The Daily Telegraph - Features
Liam Neeson saddles up in 1970s Ireland
Film In the Land of Saints and Sinners 15 cert, 106 min ★★★★★
Dir Robert Lorenz
Starring Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Jack Gleeson, Ciarán Hinds, Sarah Greene, Colm Meaney
Liam Neeson has played so many conflicted hitmen that you could rack up their mugshots and play a solid round of Guess Who?, though his latest stands out from the pack. Finbar Murphy is his name and contract killing in 70s Ireland is his game, thanks to a Donegal mobster (Colm Meaney) with no shortage of enemies worth bumping off.
Over the years, Finbar has honed a tried-and-true routine: bundling his mark in the boot, driving them to a remote beauty spot, handing them a spade, then dispatching them with a shotgun as soon as their grave is sufficiently deep. To this regimen he has added two poetic touches: every resting place is marked with a sapling, and every victim gets 60 seconds to plead their case.
Except one day, a target takes a different tack, pleading with Finbar to do something positive with his remaining days. This turns out to be killing on principle. A small IRA cell, led by Kerry Condon’s fearsome Doireann McCann, are lying low nearby, and when Finbar learns that one of them – Doireann’s brother Curtis (Desmond Eastwood) – has acted violently towards a young girl, he exacts revenge, prompting a feud that spills out across the glens.
The film’s director is Robert Lorenz, Clint Eastwood’s producing partner of two decades. Ten or 20 years ago, it could have been reworked as an Eastwoodian Western with only minimal adjustments. The mood is glowering, the landscapes wide open, the climactic shootout even takes place in a saloon, while the Troubles themselves are little more than a period backdrop.
There’s a find-and-replace quality to aspects of the writing – Ciarán Hinds’s local policeman is a kindly sheriff figure, while Game of Thrones’ Jack Gleeson is the wayward young gunslinger that Finbar grows determined to save from a fate like his own.
But such stock roles are geed up by strong performances: Neeson feels more engaged here than in his previous pseudo-Western with Lorenz, 2021’s The Marksman, while Condon’s bomber-matriarch is a worthy foe. In heated moments, she’s a Catherine wheel of C-words – but her best scene is a quiet one, in which she breaks the news to an elderly woman that she’s just shot her son. “Believe me, he had it coming,” she sighs, before adding: “I’m not trying to be disrespectful or nothing.” Even Clint would have to doff his wide brim to that.
On Netflix now