Kill the Irishman (2011)
Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh
Over the summer of 1976, thirty-six bombs detonate in the heart of Cleveland while a turf war raged between Irish mobster Danny Greene and the Italian mafia. Based on a true story, Kill the Irishman chronicles Greene's heroic rise from a tough Cleveland neighborhood to become an enforcer in the local mob.
1 connection found
View:
1 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Kill the Irishman to
Hensleigh, who began his career as a screenwriter on films like Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995) and Armageddon (1998) before making his directorial debut with the ill-fated comic book adaptation The Punisher (2004), has clearly internalized the best mafioso movies, and at different points Kill the Irishman evokes their greatest hits, whether it be the dark, spaghetti-laced meetings associated with The Godfather (1972) or the hard-edged punctuation of violence with pop music favored by Martin Scorsese in GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Departed (2006).
But the biggest problem with Kill The Irishman isn’t that it rips off Goodfellas, because plenty of good films and television shows have ripped it off well.
Despite the presence of standards such as clandestine meetings in dark restaurants and thickly-accented spaghetti-inhaling goombas, Hensleigh’s film — which he co-wrote with Jeremy Walters (based on a book by Rick Porrello, an Ohio police chief) — hews closer in tone to a war picture than Goodfellas.
NEW YORK – In the decades since The Godfather, the bar has again been set high for American organized-crime drama on big screens and small with sagas like Goodfellasand The Sopranos, among others.
Twenty-one years later and the spawn of Goodfellas continue to proliferate, the latest being Kill the Irishman, a mind-numbingly familiar saga of thuggish tough guys, dapper mafioso, and urban warfare that, despite a based-on-real-life pedigree, proves indistinguishable from its imitative brethren.
The only thing Irishman really accomplishes is inspiring a desire to watch Goodfellas again.