Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie Review

Goodfellas, Cleveland style.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 24, 2011

Ogden is a quasi-bedroom community a half hour or so to the north of Salt Lake City which, in my youth anyway, was a quiet little town without even much of a downtown area, a town we’d drive to occasionally from Salt Lake, where I grew up for the first few years of my life, in order to visit some of my parents’ old friends. Imagine my shock and awe, then, years later in watching a documentary on the history of organized crime in America, when it was stated that a number of high profile career criminals chose Ogden as their refuge in the World War II era, specifically because of the town’s remoteness and lack of a public profile. The thought of hardened Mafiosi sharing the streets with pious Mormons actually made me laugh a little, so odd was the imagined juxtaposition. It may not quite be in the same category, but how many people would think of Cleveland as a major hub of organized crime? New York, Chicago, Las Vegas—sure. But Cleveland, for crying out loud? The land of the burning Cuyahoga River? The birthplace of sweet, ultra-square Drew Carey? Impossible! And yet, the quasi-documentary biographical history lesson Kill the Irishman brings the vicious gang warfare of 1960’s and 1970’s Cleveland frighteningly to life, helped by regular interstitials of actual news reports detailing years of killings, reprisals and power grabs that ultimately ended up making national headlines. The focus of the film is Danny Greene, a real life Cleveland man who considered himself a descendant of (in his own words) “Celtic warriors,” ultimately becoming President of Cleveland’s Longshoremen's Union, going to jail for corruption, and then entering a life of crime which saw him regularly sparring with the city’s (mostly Italian) Mafiosi. Highlighted by a visceral performance by Ray Stevenson as Danny, Kill the Irishman is an interesting if not especially innovative take on the gangster film, one which delves perhaps more deeply into the character of its anti-hero than typical movies of this ilk, and which benefits from a decidedly real feeling of time and place.

Cleveland might seem on its face to be an odd place for gangland shenanigans, and yet Kill the Irishman makes it completely clear that, though perhaps relatively small scale when compared to larger metropolises, the criminal activity in Cleveland in the 1960’s and 1970’s was both organized and ruthless. What’s interesting about the film’s depiction, and something that at least partially differentiates Kill the Irishman from countless other “goodfella” movies, is that Danny, while a criminal himself, is shown fighting with the bad guy powers that be from almost the first moment. In fact the film starts with an exciting sequence which is temporally actually toward the end of the story, when Danny eludes an assassination attempt, one of an improbably long string of such unsuccessful attempts, made at the behest of the Italian crime syndicate which was trying to control Cleveland’s criminal underworld. Flashing back after that we see that Danny is a rather iconoclastic bad guy, one who early in his career stood up for the working stiffs at the dock, putting down a corrupt union boss (and becoming one in that guy’s stead), and then, after a stint in jail, becoming a thorn in the side of the ruling gangster elite of his region.

Danny actually squirrels his way into the Italian labyrinth courtesy of a man who would ultimately become his comrade in arms, a low level “goombah” named John Nardi (Vincent D’Onofrio), a sort of well meaning but ineffective shlub who helps to introduce Danny to the ruling “family” and helps Danny to pick up the pieces after his jail time. Along the way Danny becomes a putative FBI informant, though he never manages to come up with much salient information, and ultimately becomes an enforcer for a Jewish bookmaker named Shondor Burns (Christopher Walken in a kind of creepy cameo). But Danny has what might be delusions of grandeur, delusions borne by a sense that he’s a cut above the everyday criminal element, due to his supposed divinely Irish heritage.

Kill the Irishman works best as a character study of a fascinating and complex man who managed to both right and wrong seemingly simultaneously. Danny Greene certainly had a moral center, as off kilter as his actual methods may have been. In terms of several other elements in the film, things get decidedly more hackneyed. We have the hapless, put upon wife (Linda Cardellini), as well as a coterie of Italian American gangsters from both Cleveland and New York (everyone from Tony Lo Bianco to Paul Sorvino) who become increasingly frustrated by Danny’s ability to muscle in on their territory while being able to consistently elude their attempts to kill him. But perhaps the film’s most hoary cliché is something out of an old Warner Brothers gangster flick from the 1930’s—the childhood buddies who grow up to be on opposite sides of the law. In this case we have Danny, the career criminal, pitted against Detective Joe Mantinski (Val Kilmer), a cop who has a grudging admiration for Danny’s ability to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

This is a film which ultimately rises or falls on the strength of its performances, and in that regard Kill the Irishman is on almost completely solid ground. Ray Stevenson, who has recently become something of a sensation in the miniseries Rome, delivers the kind of standout performance here that can instantly jump start a major film career, and I personally won’t be very surprised if he shows up on the short list of Best Actor nominees when the 2012 Oscar announcements are made. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with exceptional turns by Cardellini in a fairly stereotypical role and Steve Schirripa (The Sopranos) as a garbage hauler who refuses to be strong armed into joining a union Danny is trying to manage. Somewhat more problematic are D’Onofrio, who is overly mannered, as well as Kilmer, who starts out with a really rather convincing quasi-Boston accent before he suddenly remembers the film is set in Cleveland and reverts to a more natural sounding accent.

Aside from the visceral acting which is on often florid display throughout Kill the Irishman, the film does an exceptional job of developing a very authentic sense of what the Cleveland gang scene was like in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The elegant, if boorish, “upper crust” Italians are brilliantly contrasted against the hardscrabble, blue collar Irish and the increasing sense of Danny’s resentment and in a way even his entitlement is perfectly captured, running against the completely unironic commentary offered by scores of real news reports showing the devastation Cleveland experienced in a decade or so of increasingly unpredictable violence. While Kill the Irishman never completely eludes its own cliché-ridden elements, like Danny Greene himself it manages to survive against considerable odds, at least for a while.

Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kill the Irishman blasts onto Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Digitally shot in native high definition, the film exhibits a typically smooth surfaced look that may initially bother some grain lovers, but which ultimately works very well for the film, despite its gritty ambience. Contrast is intentionally overblown throughout large swaths of the film, and there is also a tendency toward desaturation in a number of sequences, but overall this is an extremely sharp, very well detailed transfer that helps to create a suitably grimy mood. Despite the overblown contrast and occasionally blanched color, the palette on display is very nicely variegated and, within the confines of the desaturation, quite robust. Fine detail is excellent throughout the film, with Stevens' weathered face matched perhaps only by Walken's, and depth of field in the many shots of Cleveland providing an excellent account of the city. There is some passable CGI throughout the film which is certainly not state of the art, and which is softer than the image generally, but which suffices to depict a number of violent explosions. Several darker scenes suffer from moderate to severe crush. As might be expected, the archival footage of actual news reports of the time which dot the feature are all presented in 1.33:1 and have less than stellar video quality.

Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

What Kill the Irishman's lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track lacks in consistent surround activity it more than makes up for in incredibly bombastic LFE. To be fair, the film does offer a good deal of immersion in a number of sequences, notably several shootouts and explosions, and the film is filled to the brim with one fantastic source cue after another (including a seriously temporally misplaced disco cut which the film has playing in a 1960's scene), all of which fill the surrounds with sparkling activity. A lot of the film plays out in smaller dialogue scenes, and those are almost universally anchored front and center, with occasional directionality. Fidelity is excellent throughout the track, but it's the low end that will probably strike most as being the best, most visceral, element of this soundtrack.

Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Danny Greene: The Rise and Fall of the Irishman (SD; 1:00:27) is an exceptional documentary profiling Danny, filled with really interesting interviews, as well as copious archival footage, some featuring Danny himself. This makes a perfect companion piece to the film and helps provide considerable illumination into Danny's character.
• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 2:06)

Kill the Irishman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kill the Irishman is a fairly typical gangster flick placed in an atypical setting, Cleveland, and with an atypical lead character, Danny Greene. A lot of this film plays like leftovers from any number of better known gangster movies, but it manages to overcome this weakness by dint of the fact that it is anchored by an amazingly visceral performance by Ray Stevenson, who explodes into mainstream film prominence with this role. Filled with a number of fascinating and mostly well done supporting turns, and with solid directorial craft by Jonathan Hensleigh, Kill the Irishman may be an oft-told story, but it still manages to be unique in its own way. Recommended.