Ordinary Decent Criminal - Video Review

Starring: Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino and Stephen Dullan
Directed by: Thaddeus O'Sullivan

Had it not been for the fact that the movie is based on a true story, my response would have been definitely very different. Not just in the review, but even as it was rolling on the VCR.
Headlining Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino (Dogma) in the leads, the film seemed so attractive on the cover of it. Though the lives of American gangsters have inspired many films with different takes on the same characters, John Boorman's account of the life and times of Ireland's best-known criminal of recent years took the classic gangster film structure and added layers of sociological and psychological detail, pretty much telling the story as well as it could be.
Even though it has sporadic moments of rapid pace and overall dumbing-down of the characters and situation, it fails to achieve any kind of impact.
The story of Cahill's life of crime has been tweaked slightly into a tale of the cost of fame. Instead of a melancholy study of urban crime and the psychology of the criminal fraternity, Ordinary Decent Criminal is a slapstick farce about how a fun-loving criminal achieves fame and notoriety at the cost of his career and friendships.
Robbed of its social context and any semblance of believable characterisation, the film concentrates on broad, silly comedy. It borders awkwardly on parody, but really this is more evidence of the panic which has affected the film on the whole. It also tries hard to make Cahill (here called "Michael Lynch" although he lives the same polygamous life, does many of the things Cahill did in real life, and caps his career with the theft of a painting; albeit Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ in this film, which provides an opportunity for some rambling about the character's messianic fantasies and his gang as 'cool' as possible by having them all dressed in black leather.
The situation in the film is pushed for social acceptability by having none of them particularly violent (one cruel scene stands out and seems incongruous amid this young-boy fantasy), and by generally making it seem more of a cartoon than a drama. But does it succeed in that? Barely makes it as a border case. These criminals are more like Sgt. Bilko's outfit than a group of thugs and robbers, and the Gardai are portrayed as stupid and country-fried. When the few dramatic scenes then come, they fall completely flat, and the whole film feels unbalanced, inappropriate and embarrassing.
Spacey is a capable performer, but his is badly miscast. He does his best under the circumstances, but his accent is woefully misjudged, his characterisation shallow and the result is fatally artificial. Fiorentino has less screen time as his wife, but is again a little too sophisticated for the character and seems badly out of place. Support from Helen Baxendale and Peter Mullan, among others, is less intrusive, but with the leads so clearly wrong for the film, the rest falls by the wayside.
Compounding their problems is the rapid editing, all of which feels too much like an attempt to distract audiences from the familiarity of the basic story ingredients and dupe them into thinking the film really has a character of its own. If it had, it wouldn't have been so desperate to prove it. It doesn't, and no amount of technique will cover this up.
Ordinary Decent Criminal is a disappointment in many ways coming, as it does, from filmmakers and performers of this calibre. But this is a frankly dreadful film: difficult to watch, painfully wrong headed, stressfully slow and obviously in frantic search of a young audience who will not really care how shallow and uninvolving it is and how badly it has misrepresented both the letter and the spirit of the story it pretends not to tell. Irish viewers will want to see it out of curiosity, but if you have seen The General, an earlier film based on the same character and closer to the real story line, then Ordinary Decent Criminal is overtly ordinary.

Video cassette courtesy: Gulf Laser