MEANEY STREETS (A BELFAST STORY)

Last year, at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in Killarney, the party's national chairperson Declan Kearney listed a series of gruesome events that took place in Co Kerry during the Irish Civil War.

These included the killing of five Free State soldiers by anti-Treaty guerrillas in a booby trap bomb at Knocknagoshel on March 6, 1923.

The following day, Free State forces marched nine anti-Treaty prisoners from Ballymullen barracks in Tralee to the Ballyseedy crossroads, tied them to a landmine, detonated it and machine gunned them. One of the men survived.

Nine prisoners were killed a day later in reprisals for Knocknagoshel by pro-Treaty forces in two incidents where they were also tied to landmines - at Countess Bridge near Killarney and at Cahirciveen.

Up to that point, 68 Free State soldiers had been killed in the county and 157 wounded and a further 17 would die before the end of the Civil War.

A total of 32 anti-Treaty fighters were killed in the county in March 1923 - only five in actual combat.

The point that Declan Kearney was making was that nothing was done in the aftermath of these brutal Civil War incidents in Kerry and elsewhere to "reconcile the seismic hurts" caused.

"No reconciliation was put in place in this state to try and heal the human effects of that conflict," he observed.

"The divisions created became trans generational. They blighted Irish society for nine decades."

Almost 20 years on from the IRA and Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefires, Northern Ireland is still struggling with its horrific past.

Many people bear the physical and emotional scars of the Troubles and some are anxious to get to bottom of what exactly happened to their loved ones.

Republicans, loyalists, the British and Irish Governments and their security forces have failed to collectively address the seismic hurt caused.

Everyone knows war, whether it is in Northern Ireland or elsewhere, is dirty.

Nobody has found a formula to handle the mess left behind.

Nor are we certain in Northern Ireland that our society is ready to face some very dark, uncomfortable truths.

But one thing we are all certain about is that that failure to come up with a satisfactory mechanism for dealing with the past is holding back reconciliation and normalisation.

It is in these circumstances that the experienced US diplomats Richard Haass and Meghan O'Sullivan have arrived in Belfast, facing the gargantuan task of coming up with solutions for not only the legacy of the Troubles but problems like contentious parades, flags and emblems and segregation.

It is in these circumstances that Nathan Todd's debut thriller about the legacy of the Troubles, 'A Belfast Story' has hit our cinema screens.

A couple of weeks ago, Todd's movie made the headlines when journalists were sent promotional gifts of a balaclava, nails and duct tape.

The publicity stunt was denounced by some film critics as incredibly insensitive and cackhanded.

The director, a Queen's University engineering graduate, went on BBC and UTV to apologise.

In one respect, this outrageous PR stunt achieved its objective - drawing a lot of advance publicity in the UK and Ireland for a movie that might otherwise have  slipped away unnoticed.

But was it carried out to bolster a feeble movie? 

In Todd's resolutely bleak thriller, Colm Meaney plays a weary Northern Ireland Police Service detective heading towards retirement who is asked to investigate a nail bomb attack on an ageing IRA veteran.

As the movie unfolds, several IRA veterans are bumped off - one is shot dead in an alleyway, another is poisoned (in a scene that gives a whole new meaning to "he's had his chips"), three more are abducted and are executed by masked gunmen on a remote hill.

However their executors do not appear to be loyalist or republican.

As Meaney's constantly sighing detective visits crime scene after crime scene, Northern Ireland's slick republican First Minister (played by Tommy O'Neill) calls upon a veteran IRA hard man, Eamonn (Paddy Rocks) to track down the mystery gang behind the killings.

It turns out Meaney's character is mourning the loss of his own daughter in a pipe bomb attack during the Troubles.

But that isn't all that he has to contend with. 

There's a meddling NIPS Chief Constable (played by veteran English actor Malcolm Sinclair).

Yes, you read that right. The killers could be caught by the NIPS.

And then Meaney has to share screen time with a member of the Hole In The Wall Gang - Tim McGarry as a former IRA bomber - and his fellow 'Give My Head Peace' star Olivia Nash.

On one level, Todd, who hadn't made any film prior to this, has to be commended for managing to get a feature length movie made. That is no mean feat.

And it is extraordinary how he has managed to recruit accomplished actors like Colm Meaney and Stuart Graham to appear.

But that's where the congratulations end.

The finished product is one hell of a mess.

The script is riddled with cliches and questionable narrative decisions, the costumes look amateurish and the acting makes 'Give My Head Peace' look like 'Glengarry, Glen Ross'.

Meaney, a wonderful character actor who can illuminate the screen as he demonstrated recently in 'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa', wanders around looking incredibly glum in a crumpled old mac.

He appears to be going through the motions as he bemoans the injustice of a peace process that has left victims behind.

Dubliner O'Neill struggles with a wobbly Northern accent and trots out soulless speeches that sound like they have been ripped out of a political pamphlet, even when he is trying to emote.

Rocks scowls as he arranges a series of cliched rendezvous with comrades on the Sydenham by-pass bridge, in the docks, in alleyways and in an underpass.

Sinclair tries to inject some mischief into the role of the Chief Constable but he would have done well to have studied Jim Norton's masterclass in naked contempt in a similar role in Ken Loach's shoot to kill drama, 'Hidden Agenda'. 

Maggie Cronin (from Terry George's Oscar winning short film 'The Shore') turns up (yawn) as a former "bomber with a conscience" and the younger members of the cast - Damien Hasson as a policeman and Susan Davey as an idealistic aide to the First Minister - are given scraps to work with.

Graham, who pops up as an advisor to O'Neill's Saor Eireann First Minister - yes, you read that right, not a Sinn Fein First Minister - has very little to do.

Todd initially seems to be reaching for a story that recalls David Fincher's superlative dark thriller 'Seven' but this barely makes it past level one, as the movie slides into 'Death Wish' as imagined by Ed Wood.

There's some weird cinematography - particularly in one scene where a former IRA gunman tries to flee a gang through some Belfast alleyways in an 'In the Name of the Father' style pursuit.

The characters also have an annoying tendency to slip into clumsily written soliloquies.

They talk about sculpting hope from the ashes and the cliches just roll on and on.

"All I want is a brand new day in my city," Meaney muses in a graveyard.

"We are living in the shadows of the past."

But that is precisely the problem with Todd's film because it uses the cinematic cliches of past Troubles films to make a rambling and unconvincing point about the future.

And it's final pay-off that you can only break from a violent past through violent acts is highly questionable.

 

James Marsh's 'Shadow Dancer' last year demonstrated how a Troubles thriller can be deftly handled in a way that is gripping and doesn't feel exploitative.

Todd would do well to study that movie or Neil Jordan's stunning debut thriller 'Angel' which really showed the corrosive effects of violence in Northern Ireland.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought 'We're The Millers' would be the worst movie this year.

I'll take that back.

It will take a really horrendous movie to dislodge 'A Belfast Story' as the cinematic turkey of 2013.

(‘A Belfast Story' opened in the Movie House cinemas and other UK and Irish cinemas on September 20, 2013)