Arriving just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Kill the Irishman is based on a true story of Cleveland’s gangland in the 1960s and 70s. But every scene — in fact, nearly every shot, line of dialogue, and gesture — will give you déjà vu if you’ve seen just one mob movie in your life. Especially if that movie was Goodfellas.
From the hero’s formative years as a scrappy street kid, to his discovery that straight jobs are for suckers, to his wife’s discovery that staying with him might be dangerous, to his belated, foiled attempt to go straight, every gangster-film cliché is clumsily and witlessly rehashed to the point of self-parody. The only nods to novelty are the Midwest setting and a main character who expresses his Irish pride with the zest of a Lucky Charms commercial. Oh, and instead of a Scorsese-esque soundtrack full of doo-wop, big-band, and classic rock nuggets, we get ersatz Celtic strains and a collection of pop obscurities, which must have been licensed cheaply so that more of the budget could be spent on vintage Cadillacs and the pyrotechnics to detonate them.
The thugs that populate Kill the Irishman blow up an awful lot of cars, and when that gets old, they blow up a house. Standing somehow unscathed at the vortex of all this mayhem is Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), who became legendary for surviving multiple attempts on his life. The film charts Greene’s rise from longshoreman to union boss to organized crime figure, but it loses interest in showing how he continues to make a living once he’s alienated or murdered all of his associates. Maybe he was earning residuals for every explosion in Cleveland that didn’t kill him. After his first arrest, he gets out of jail by becoming an FBI informant, but not once do we see him engaging in any sort of informing activities. Perhaps that would have complicated director Jonathan Hensleigh’s preposterous effort to lionize a man who responds to brutality and bigotry with more brutality and bigotry.
There’s something absurdly comic about a bunch of thugs running around blowing up each other and themselves, while the one thug they’re trying to blow up keeps getting away. Kill the Irishman might have worked as a black comedy about a man whose unlikely survival confounds his would-be assassins, like a mob version of The Ladykillers or I Love You to Death. But Hensleigh’s attempts at humor are woefully misplaced. While he invites us to snicker at Greene’s antics as he insults, beats, and murders his enemies, he plays the deaths of Greene’s friends for pathos. Although there’s no objective difference among any of these thugs, the surging bagpipes on the soundtrack cue us as to which ones we’re supposed to mourn. The morality of this would be offensive if the results weren’t so unintentionally funny.
Of the talented cast, only two performers have fun with the movie’s ridiculousness: Fionnula Flanagan, who lays on the blarney so thick you expect her to break into a jig, and Christopher Walken, who has decades of experience wringing entertainingly eccentric performances out of poor scripts. Neither has to shoulder the storytelling burdens of Vincent D’Onofrio, who — looking eerily like William Shatner — struggles to give his character some nerdish tics, or Val Kilmer, who literally tells the story in expository voiceovers. As the long-suffering wife, Linda Cardellini fortunately doesn’t suffer too long: in practically the only sensible and admirable act in the whole movie, she gets herself and her kids the hell out of Cleveland before it starts blowing up.
All of these actors outshine Stevenson, opaque and uncharismatic as the supposedly larger-than-life Greene. Not that he has much to work with. Greene was quirkier than the average mobster, abstaining from alcohol and red meat and reading extensively about history and politics, but instead of exploring these apparent contradictions, Hensleigh and co-screenwriter Jeremy Walters simply toss them out there for the other characters to marvel at.
Although we may never see the end of the American gangster movie, there hasn’t been a fresh one in a long time, much less a great one. But with an ironic perspective instead of a puerile moral equivalency, Danny Greene’s story could have been an interesting commentary on the vagaries of fate. Instead, Hensleigh buys into his subject’s myth of himself as an invincible Celtic warrior shielded by the hand of God. Greene wasn’t a warrior; he was a thug whose combination of shrewdness and luck kept him alive. For a while, at least — all thugs run out of luck eventually. The Cleveland mob may have taken a long time to kill the Irishman, but this film about their efforts is dead on arrival.
