Powerful, disturbing but flawed

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 2007)

Ken Loach takes a subject which has been done to death and manages to inject freshness and urgency to it. Yes, there is disturbing violence but it is historically accurate. The Black and Tans were the lowest dregs of the English prison system, violent psychopaths who were sent to wage a war of terror in Ireland because there was a shortage of regular troops after World War One. Given amnesty in return for going to Ireland, and hastily kitted out in mismatched uniforms which gave them their nickname, the Black and Tans marauded across Ireland raping and murdering at will and burning whole towns to the ground. If anything, Loach was restrained in his depiction.
The Irish resistance had no choice but to fight fire with fire. The scene where a young man is executed for giving information to the British is also disturbing but accurate. Then we see the Church siding first with the British and then with the Free State, and we see the Free State soldiers adopting British tactics and oppressing their own people - all very tragic and true to life. I can't help thinking that the Treaty - which the Brits wrote and then presented to the Irish with "Take it or leave it, and if you leave it we'll slaughter every last one of you" - was engineered to provoke a civil war in Ireland. There were so many clauses which served no purpose except to insult and humiliate the Irish. I also suspect the British were bluffing - much as they'd have liked to wage "immediate and terrible war" against Ireland, they didn't have the strength after WWI - but we'll never know.
That said, I don't agree that this is an anti-British or anti-Irish or anti-any other group film. The whole point of the film, it seems to me, is that war brutalizes, and turns brother against brother. This is a universal theme that anyone can relate to.
The film is not without faults. Cillian Murphy does a very authentic West Cork accent (but then he's from Cork City, though that's in the east of the county) and so do several of the other fighters, but some of the "locals" (especially Orla Fitzgerald) have strong Dublin accents which are jarringly out of place.
The biggest flaw is that the ending is weak and anti-climactic. It seems like Loach was trying too hard to make his point, and he does so in a heavy-handed and not very believable way - and then the movie suddenly ends. It was a disappointing ending to an otherwise gripping film.
On the whole, however, this is a very powerful film that is well worth seeing. Those who dismiss it out of hand (sight unseen) as a propaganda film are totally missing the point.