This is a very poorly paced, acted, and directed movie that, with a little imagination, could have delivered a decent story. The plot, such that it is, centres around two brothers from County Clare that parted in anger twenty years before the movie's setting at an Irish music festival. They meet as competitors, having engaged in some ham-fisted attempts to derail each other's arrival in time for registration, and quickly revisit the reasons for their acrimony. The plot develops so predictably from then on that the side stories are more interesting - but only marginally.
The director curiously adheres to some stereotypes of Irish people and culture (and Liverpudlians' too), with plenty of drinking, cursing, vomiting, and general idiocy; however, he gets some very obvious cultural markers wrong - single women in pubs (the movie is set in the 1960s, when Ireland was far from its current liberal self), a man ordering wine in a pub (utterly unheard of back then!), and some non-Irish outsiders going totally unnoticed. Worse than this, however, is his unwillingness to go anywhere unconventional or unpredictable: characters are as flimsy as the script, the pace dull and boring, and even the music is mediocre at best. It tells a dull story competently; but nothing more. Colm Meaney meanders through the movie in third gear, while Andrea Corr makes a tolerable debut. Patrick Bergin and Frank Kelly have cameos that they won't add to their resumes. All in all, a poor movie that wastes what little it had going for it. Do yourself a favor and rent "The Field" instead.
The director curiously adheres to some stereotypes of Irish people and culture (and Liverpudlians' too), with plenty of drinking, cursing, vomiting, and general idiocy; however, he gets some very obvious cultural markers wrong - single women in pubs (the movie is set in the 1960s, when Ireland was far from its current liberal self), a man ordering wine in a pub (utterly unheard of back then!), and some non-Irish outsiders going totally unnoticed. Worse than this, however, is his unwillingness to go anywhere unconventional or unpredictable: characters are as flimsy as the script, the pace dull and boring, and even the music is mediocre at best. It tells a dull story competently; but nothing more. Colm Meaney meanders through the movie in third gear, while Andrea Corr makes a tolerable debut. Patrick Bergin and Frank Kelly have cameos that they won't add to their resumes. All in all, a poor movie that wastes what little it had going for it. Do yourself a favor and rent "The Field" instead.