Well, I never had heard of this movie named Kill the Irishman until a friend of mine suggested this as a nice mobster film. I wondered how come I didn’t read about this anywhere on the web since its release in 2011.
Nevertheless, as I finally got to watch this, I would recommend straightway knowing the fact that it’s nowhere close to the crime genre epic The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola) or Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese), but it’s intriguing in its own way.
Adapted from the book “To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia” by Rick Porello, Kill the Irishman is yet another crime drama but with a different taste. Director Jonathan Hensleigh very well knows the fact that he is telling a true story and there is no need to go over the top with excessive bloodthirsty scenes.
Coming to the plot, the movie deals with the biopic of real-life Irish-American gangster Danny Greene, who to all the surprise, muscles himself into the top of Cleveland’s criminal underworld during the late 1970s.
As the film involves a crime figure, it chronicles the story of the life of this proud Irishman living in the brutal neighborhood of Cleveland and how he becomes a mobster from a regular guy, who worked tirelessly as a dockworker before veering into the lane of organized crime.
Ray Stevenson as Danny Greene could have done a slightly better job for such a realistic portrayal. We all know how a fantastic actor he is in the BBC TV series Rome as Titus Pullo and in the film Punisher: War Zone, but Kill the Irishman is not one of his best performances.
In the end, looking at the real-life figure, many of us may even wonder if such a person actually lived in that time, and this is the fact that it generates curiosity to more about the life of that person – his rise and fall. All the more, the film was indeed watchable for supporting actors like Christopher Walken, Val Kilmer, and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Also Read: THE IRISHMAN (Trailer) – De Niro & Pacino with Martin Scorsese
Where to watch "Kill the Irishman" (2011)
