Based on the true story of Irish mobster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), Kill the Irishman is a series of violent montages with a little bit of story in-between. When car bombs aren’t going off and witty racial slurs aren’t being batted back-and-forth you’re left with very little. The only reason this film ever comes to a close is because history dictates the outcome. Had Greene’s story and his interaction with the Italian mafia already not been set in stone I’m not sure director by Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) would have ever been able to end this thing.
Beginning in 1975, the film chronicles Greene’s rise from a lowly Cleveland shipyard worker, to corrupt union leader to straight up mobster, killing anyone that gets in his way. In this sense, Hensleigh’s decision to use archival footage actually hurts the film as it feels like a narrative crutch he falls back on time and time again. The formula seems to be to offer a little bit of story, kill a whole bunch of people and then conclude each act by showing actual news footage recapping the crimes. Repeat that two more times and you have Kill the Irishman.
Ray Stevenson may fit the role of Greene in stature, but as an actor, he and his brutish appearance and 6′ 4″ frame are better suited for the roles he’s played in films such as King Arthur and The Book of Eli. The opening scenes where Hensleigh shows Greene doing a bit of reading, trying to prove to us he’s a self-educated man, are laughable in their lack of subtlety. He may as well have shown him sketching blueprints of the Cleveland Justice Center Complex and using an abacus for his calculations. Even more comical is the introduction to Greene’s soon-to-be wife (Linda Cardellini) as Greene is shown reading the history of “Irish Battalions in the Great War” at a bar she’s tending when she slips him her number. A minute later the two are getting it on in the backseat of a car in the alley outside the bar. Hot, right? “I never do this,” she says. Yeah, we believe you.
Christopher Walken takes a break from cooking chicken and pears to show up for a few bored minutes as loan shark Shondor Birns. And Val Kilmer steps in to narrate the film while playing a police officer for a scene or two.
Getting the most screen time outside of Stevenson is Vincent D’Onofrio as Greene’s pal John Nardi who originally is in with Cleveland’s major crime family, but in his growing allegiance with Greene soon finds himself in the crosshairs.
The best part of the film is unquestionably Robert Davi’s introduction as mob hit man Ray Ferritto, but even that is short-lived. Shortly thereafter all we see is Davi rolling around Cleveland in a dirty brown van looking like some sort of lost pedophile rather than the menacing professional we’re supposed to take him to be.
What you have here is a film with promise that under delivers. It’s all so familiar it’s boring all the way down to the cheap production design. Sure, it’s interesting to learn more about a part of mob history I wasn’t aware of before, but once I got to the end and learned the breadth of the repercussions of the life I just watched were much larger than the film would ever have me believe it made the film seem all the more inconsequential even though I just been saw proof it was in fact quite the opposite.
