Ford and Pitt try their best, but Pitt was miscast and both were betrayed by a mediocre script.
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Harrison Ford in a film about the IRA? Thinking of "Patriot Games" and the other Tom Clancy adaptations that had Ford playing CIA analyst Jack Ryan, I couldn't wait to watch "The Devil's Own." But writer Kevin Jarre is no Tom Clancy, golden boy Brad Pitt is no Irish Republican, and "The Devil's Own" is hokey by comparison.
Pitt seems remarkably miscast as Frankie McGuire, a notorious IRA activist who comes to America as Rory Devaney in order to buy guided missiles for the cause and literally "ship" them back to Northern Ireland. There's not enough sun in Ireland for anybody to get a tan, but here's Pitt with his Southern California bronze and, worse, an attempted Irish accent that fades in and out like an AM radio station on a long car drive. Words like "lovely" pull him back into character the way that "Judy, Judy, Judy" did for Cary Grant impressionists. But the rest of the language has Pitt looking (and sounding) a little lost. And he's not helped by a screenplay that seems a little dull for a political thriller, with not nearly enough suspenseful moments, high-octane action, or plot twists to rival the Clancy material.
Director Alan J. Pakula has certainly shown that he can direct a solid political thriller, having given us "The Parallax View" (1974), "All the President's Men" (1976), "Presumed Innocent" (1990), and "The Pelican Brief" (1993). But this 1997 film feels by-the-numbers.
It begins with a sequence in a remote coastal area of Northern Ireland in 1972, where a father takes his son out on the family trawler and teaches him how to fish. But as the family sits down to their evening meal and the father is in the middle of a prayer (not before, and not after, mind you) a masked gunman bursts in and shoots dad right in front of the son he was just praising. A newscaster on the television tells us the father was a "Republican sympathizer," and then we fast-forward 20 years to police talking about Frankie McGuire as a Most Wanted figure because of all the lives he's taken--in retaliation, obviously. But it's that kind of obviousness that pushes this film toward its conclusion. The scene where a policeman gets killed couldn't be telegraphed more loudly and clearly by clumsy dialogue and character manipulation. Logic is the first victim in a grand scene where Frankie and his friends engage in a Bonnie and Clyde shootout with the British soldiers. So many tanks drive up the street and begin firing at the front of the building that it looks like WWII. Helicopters hover, lead flies, but the guys inside seem awfully calm. "Come on, Frankie, we've got to go," one of his compatriots says. Okay. And so they do. They waltz out the back door, where none of the soldiers thought to go. Moments like these make this film feel so artificial that it's hard to get swept up in the drama.
Then there's Pitt, with his alternately lilting and groping Irish accent, with gestures that are equally caught in limbo. More than once you catch him stopping himself from doing the golden boy hair flip.
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