My old friend Liam “Big Nose Beady Eyes” Neeson again. Jiminy Christmas, this guy makes more movies than anyone else I can think of. In fact, I’m going to Google it right now.
[Elevator Music]
Okay, so it turns out the Guinness World Record for most acting credits is held by Kanneganti Brahmanandan – a Tollywood actor with over 1000 films – wow! In terms of our American actors, there appears to be a wide variety of answers. But it looks like… good Lord… Eric “Ham Hands” Roberts is currently in the lead with over 400! Several other old timers like Christopher Lee and Mickey Rooney had over 200. BNBE is just over 100 – he’s got a way to go!
Anywho, this was an unusual role for BNBE – and a nice change of pace. He played an Irish protestant and got to use his native Irish accent. This was a story about the violence between the Protestants and Catholics in the 1970s. Specifically, the movie followed the lives of Alastair, a 17 year old Ulster Volunteer Force member in 1975 who was eager to prove himself. To do so, he killed young IRA member James Griffin in his home as his younger brother, Joe, watched in horror. The movie then jumped 33 years to 2008 where the adult Alastair, played by BNBE, after spending 12 years in prison for that murder, was recruited by a film team as part of a reconciliation effort to meet with the adult Joe, played by James Nesbitt. I’ve seen this guy in other movies and he’s a very good actor, with a wee bit of Irish ham. Oddly, though, he looks like someone morphed the face of George Clooney with the Simpsons’ Dan Castellaneta.
In any event, this movie had a rocky start for me, as I was just too damn high. All the closeups of faces started freaking me out. However, foolish readers, I persevered through the heebie-jeebies to finish this review. And I’m glad I did. When we first saw BNBE in 2008, he was being driven in a car to meet Joe for the television show taping. But with the constant closeup views, I couldn’t stop staring at his ears. Usually, his giant nose and beady eyes affix my attention, but once I get past that, I finally noticed his fricken’ freaky ears. They were parallelograms – who has ears like that?? Jiminy Christmas! I might have to modify my BNBE moniker to BNBEPE (big nose beady eyes parallelogram ears). Speaking of ears, this movie had some epic auricles – the guy playing the TV show director looked eerily like Sting, albeit sporting flying Dumbo ears.
And why did BNBE keep responding, “aye” to every question? Aye-aye, matey!
As BNBE awaited Joe at the venue for the TV interview, he sat in this chair in the same pose as Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln memorial. In fact, it looked like a living representation of said statue – all he needed was one of those silly Amish beards and he would have been all in. It made me wonder, why in the hail did Spielberg cast uber-ham Daniel Day-Lewis to star in his 2012 Lincoln epic, instead of BNBE?? Okay enough of this poking fun at BNBE nonsense – he really was superb in this movie.
Luckily, I came down enough in the second half to enjoy the rest of the movie – where Joe, still enraged over Alastair’s murder of his older brother, plotted ways to get revenge. There was one odd scene with Joe, however, on the roof of the film venue, talking to the female Russian film crew member. Unexpectedly, he went into some bizarre half singing trill jag – what’s up with that?
I won’t reveal any more of the plot, only to convey that this movie was very interesting, intriguing and even intense at times, but well worth watching. Just take it easy with the weed – at least for the first half of this movie.
8 shots of Knappogue Castle 12 year Single Malt out of 10.