In the Land of Saints and Sinners

dir: Robert Lorenz

2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this story 14,000 times before.

An aging hitman decides he wants to stop killing people for money. But then something happens, and he has to kill more people, and then probably dies or stops killing people at least for a while.

Sound familiar? What if I told you it starred Liam Neeson? Wouldn’t you then say “you’re lazily describing every film Liam Neeson has been in for the last twenty years?”

And you would not be wrong. Ever since Taken convinced every middle-aged, middle-class dad that they, too, could torture and kill dozens of criminals if one of their kids were kidnapped, even lacking that special set of skills, Neeson has been the lead in these violent actioners that try to argue that a man in his 70s can still kick arse.

I admit that there are some fit men in their 70s. They shouldn’t be fighting people. They shouldn’t be punching people or kicking them down escalators or anything. They certainly shouldn’t be wrestling with other younger men. They should be wrestling with their consciences, with moral dilemmas, with their regrets.

This steady progression of dumb action flicks that he’s been in, including ones recently that account for his age, and one in particular called Memory where he plays a character with Alzheimer’s, makes you wonder why Neeson is in so many films every year. Why not take a break?

This is not a dumb action flick. There’s very little action in it, and there’s no need for stunt work, or for Neeson to risk throwing his back out or straining himself too bad.

And yet he still plays a chap who up till recently has killed men for money. In Ireland, of all places.

This flick is set in 1975, in County Donegal, so it’s one of those rare instances where a film has characters in Ireland talking about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants.

It’s also a rare flick where the ‘bad guys’ are IRA terrorists.

I mean, I thought they were all saints, serving their noble cause.

Turns out they may be the sinners of the title. We watch four of them plant a bomb to kill a target, but unfortunately they kill a mother and two kids as well.

Oh well, no biggie. They flee down the coast to the west, and lay low, perhaps hoping that people might forget about it after a couple of days.

But wouldn’t you know it, fiddle dee dee potatoes, one of the IRA goons decides to threaten and then sexually assault a local child.

Whoa, stop right there. This is Ireland in the 1970s. That’s not tolerated in Ireland, unless it’s by the local priest.

So the IRA can fuck right off.

Finbar (Neeson) smokes a pipe, goes shooting with the local police constable (Ciaran Hinds) once a week, who I think is his best friend, and is generally liked by the other peasants in the village. He doesn’t drink to excess, doesn’t make a pest of himself to the local ladies, and he doesn’t cut his fingers off and throw them at anyone’s door, or at their tiny donkey called Jenny, leading to her unfortunate death.

But he does murder people for money. He has a fixer (the great Colm Meaney) who sends him a name and a location, and a helpful photo, and that’s that.

Finbar kills a man he been contracted to kill, but he doesn’t enjoy it. He plants a tree above the grave, but the victim’s last words haunt him still. The man, knowing what was coming and that it was inevitable, urges Finbar to do something else with his life after this unfortunate unpleasantness, to find a way to be a bigger part of the community, and to make a more positive impact beyond filling a forest with corpses.

Unlike most flicks where someone decides not to kill anymore or do crimes and the like, Finbar really, really means it. So when a day later he finds out about the IRA goon molesting one of his neighbours, he’s like “Now I must kill again, but I do it with regret.”

The problem is, the IRA goon has a sister, played by Kerry Condon, and she is fucking terrifying. Even the two other IRA goons are afraid of her. She is so fucking feral that I’m a bit afraid of the actress as well. I’m a tiny bit afraid that she might hear, somehow, about this review, and come after me. Thus I choose my words so, so carefully! She is a delight, an absolute delight. As gentle and sweet as she was as the frustrated sister of one of the main dumb characters in The Banshees of Inisherin, she is fearsome and furious here, and I almost wish she got her way and killed half of Ireland.

That sister is resolved to kill whoever made her brother disappear, and she doesn’t care if she kills the entire town to do so.

Naturally, Finbar doesn’t want that to happen. He finds that he actually does care about these people, and wants to do everything he can to save them from people who are just as cool with ending people’s lives as he used to be until just yesterday.

The thing is, though, this film is not one to approach as a crime flick, or as an action flick at all. It’s definitely not an action flick, no matter what it might look like. It only works, it only has anything enjoyable about it if you believe Finbar has actually allowed himself, after all this time, to start caring about people again, and that he cares about the humble peasants of this village. That he cares about the neighbour Rita (Niamh Cusack), even with the complication of her husband slowly dying in the background.

That he actually likes the cop he drinks and shoots cans with, as they sit around and presumably talk Irish bollocks whenever they can. Or that when he’s blown away by a young fiddle player’s musicianship (Valentine Olukuga), he’s actually impressed, and tells him so with sincerity.

The film, for me, was enjoyable because the grim reality of most of the flicks Neeson is in lately is that he gives flat, grunting, bored performances in those action flicks that have nothing more as a draw card than “Liam Neeson kills a bunch of young people”. As such he acts accordingly.

That’s the enjoyable part of the film, for me. Irish people hanging out talking with their natural accents, being all Irish without having to talk about potatoes or blarney or The Troubles. You’ll be surprised how little anyone says about the IRA, the unionists or the English in this flick set during some of the worst moments of the conflict, and that’s more than okay. Neeson already played Michael Collins in a biopic of the same name, so he doesn’t need to re-tread old ground.

What does it matter anyway? None of that would improve the film’s better qualities, or obscure the nastier parts. It all ends in a bloodbath, but at least Finbar did his best to try to protect some people from the repercussions of his own actions.

8 times in the land of saints and sinners, the person who believes in neither is king out of 10

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“Try and do some good, before you find yourself here.” - In the Land of Saints and Sinners