Irish gangsters, at least in the movies, like to talk. Florid monologues, richly punctuated with both expletives and erudite vocabulary, that bring an aura of Celtic winsomeness to the mayhem. Such is the case in Ian Fitzgibbon’s poor man’s In Bruges, in which down-and-out Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) has to run a merry race when he fails to pay his debts to ferocious Dublin kingpin Darren Perrier (the General himself, Brendan Gleeson).
Meanwhile, Michael’s estranged da (Jim Broadbent) has had an epiphany in which the Grim Reaper tells him his time is near. So he wants to reconcile with Michael, but instead he gets caught up with the boy’s own flight from death, along with Michael’s sexy, neurotic next-door neighbor, a pair of burglars, a pack of wild dogs, and lots of blarney.
“There’s a point to all this drivel,” says Gabriel Byrne’s mysterious narrator. Or is the drivel the whole point?
