Style over substance

Rating: 6/10 (14 August 2008)

I was disappointed in this film. I had seen and admired some films of Ken Loach's before, but didn't make the connection. Elsewhere in the critiques of this film, one viewer derides the idea of providing English subtitles for a film nominally made in English. I disagree totally. If the dialogue is as mumbled, heavily accented and as poorly recorded as it was in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, it becomes difficult to follow the story. There was nothing wrong with the acting, unless you count the deliberately improvisational "naturalistic" delivery that always winds up sounding, to me, like actors improvising. Phony. Maybe if there had been subtitles I wouldn't have had to search for familiar syllables amongst the brogues. The story itself is worthwhile, in that it presents the same conflicts as The Informer and Michael Collins, but does so in terms of people in rural Ireland, and two brothers in particular. I was looking forward to the story; I got it, but missed a lot of the dialogue. It almost seems as if the director and sound man insisted, for reasons of authenticity, on using ambient recording over looping, and then did a crappy job of the ambient recording. It comes off as amateurish. These guys are pros?
There was one other minor issue that stuck out early in the film, possibly because of a bad edit: A group of men, at night, quietly pulls up beside the police barracks; one gets out and plants a large bomb against the stable(garage) door. He lights the fuse, then moves to another large door and is setting up a second bomb when he is interrupted, and the gang is forced to storm the barracks. The first bomb never goes off. I was waiting for it. Nothing happened.