In the Land of Saints and Sinners
Liam Neeson returns to Ireland, but is still in a killing frame of mind….
Murphy’s war: Ciarán Hinds and Liam Neeson
You can’t move in Hollywood these days without bumping into an Irish Oscar nominee. It perhaps made sense, then, for Oscar nominee Liam Neeson to return to his homeland, where they don’t know what he can do with a gun. For nowadays, Neeson comes with a price on his head. Long gone are the days when he was famous for playing Oskar Schindler or Rob Roy. It may be a running joke in In the Land of Saints and Sinners, then, if only the film had a sense of humour.
Neeson plays Finbar Murphy, the toughest 71-year-old in County Donegal, who kills people for a living (he will find you…). Yet in the quiet coastal village of Glencolmcille, where Finbar haunts the local pub in a cloth cap puffing on a giant pipe and reading Dostoevsky, nobody thinks to ask him what he does to pull in his pennies. But Finbar being Liam Neeson, he is a kindly killer, who neatly arranges his victims in a copse of corpses in which the doomed dig their own graves before being put out of their misery – and are supplanted by a sapling. Then, as they say, Finbar embarks on one final job…
Liam Neeson may be 71, but his films have never felt that old – not until this one came along. Under the direction of Oscar nominee Robert Lorenz, the film has a stately, even plodding nature, neither mining the bleak humour of the oeuvre of Oscar nominee Martin McDonagh, or the hard-nosed realism of the Irish films of the 1990s, or just the simple realism of the films of Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan. At times, one senses In the Land of Saints and Sinners is straining for a note of whimsy, a flash of blarney, but Lorenz pulls back each time. He’s trying to make a Liam Neeson thriller in Martin McDonagh territory but is afraid to step on any toes. Lorenz was only 57 when he directed the film, yet he carries with him the gravitas of a much older filmmaker, perhaps a mindset left over from his years of working with Clint Eastwood (cf. Trouble with the Curve).
Neeson himself manfully fends off any hints of parody (unless you count the hair dye), leaving the acting honours to Oscar nominee Kerry Condon. One can see why she accepted the part – her trigger-happy, invective-spouting delegate for the IRA is a terrifying thing, who only asks questions after she has executed her terms (“I’m fighting for a free Ireland, you c**t”). Good, too, is Oscar nominee Ciarán Hinds, who is about the only person on screen who brings a plausible humanity to the proceedings, a wry member of the garda who sees more than he lets on (while worrying about the damage done to a road sign). In the Land of Saints and Sinners is more noble than dull, but its action sequences are routine, its lyricism blunted and its humour non-existent. Considering the Oscar-nominated talent available in the land of Guinness, high winds and car bombs, the Chicago-born Lorenz may have been the wrong man for the job.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Jack Gleeson, Colm Meaney, Ciarán Hinds, Sarah Greene, Desmond Eastwood, Niamh Cusack, Conor MacNeill, Seamus O'Hara, Michelle Gleeson, Mark O’Regan, Valentine Olukoga.
Dir Robert Lorenz, Pro Markus Barmettler, Philip Lee, Bonnie Timmermann, Geraldine Hughes, Terry Loane, Adrian Grabe and Daniel Fluri, Screenplay Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane, Ph Tom Stern, Pro Des Derek Wallace, Ed Jeremiah O'Driscoll, Music Diego Baldenweg with Nora Baldenweg & Lionel Baldenweg, Costumes Leonie Prendergast, Sound Fred Demolder.
Facing East/RagBag Pictures/Prodigal Films Limited/Merlin Films-Netflix.
106 mins. Ireland. 2023. US Rel: 29 March 2024. UK Rel: 26 April 2024. Cert. 15.
