Looks like a drama - turns out to be a Socialist Worker comic strip

Rating: 2/10 (13 June 2010)

What a waste of great film-making talent. Ken Loach has the intuitive touch of the great American directors, but almost invariably mars his creations by forcing them into the service of a dubious ideology, at times to a comical level.
This one is not quite such a rip-off as "Hidden Agenda" - a brilliant, gripping drama right up to the last few minutes, when the story veers hilariously into a ludicrous anti-Thatcher conspiracy theory - but it suffers from the same problem : they say love is blind, but the one-sidedness of this film suggests that hate, too, is equally capable of distorting one's vision.
I was hoping for some poignant depiction of the complex moral dilemmas this conflict is so pregnant with, and which other film-makers have explored so sensitively, but instead I got oversimplified black-and-white propaganda (the bad guys are the ones with the English accents pulling out the Irishmen's fingernails ; the good guys are the attractive downtrodden ones that articulate Marxist political doctrine in heroic settings).
I suppose that as a propagandist Loach is a genius, but it is at the expense of both truth, balance and art. If anyone wishes to see what the man was (is?) really capable of, watch his masterpiece, "Raining Stones", and weep with me for a lost David Lean.