'71—Movie Review

 by Peter J. O'Connell

'71. Released: Feb. 2015. Runtime: 99 mins. Rated: R for strong violence, disturbing images, and language throughout.

Last year Australian actor Jack O'Connell played real-life American hero Louis Zamperini, who went through hell in the Pacific during World War II. Now in '71 O'Connell plays a character named Gary Hook, an English soldier plunged into the hell that is Northern Ireland in 1971. The province is “hell” because it is wracked by violence as sectarian mobs of Catholics and Protestants battle each other; factions of the IRA battle the British—and other IRA factions; and corrupt cops brutalize the Catholic population. Informers and agent-provocateurs further complicate the seething situation in bleak Belfast.

When young private Hook's unit is deployed from England to Belfast, the troops, largely clueless about the conditions there, are at first bemused by such sights as youths “mooning” them or a street lined with housewives banging garbage can lids on the sidewalk in a cacophonous protest. Bemusement tirns to shock and fear, however, when a baying mob gathers, and angry rioters, faces distorted by hate, begin to move against the thin line of soldiers as tension ratchets up.

With night and a hard rain falling, the troops are withdrawn, but in the chaos Hook becomes separated from his unit. The rest of this suspenseful film deals with Hook's attempt to survive the night and escape the pursuers who want to kill him. As the wounded soldier flees through foggy streets, labyrinthine alleys and sterile apartment complexes, his plight is not only harrowing, but also a Kafkaesque nightmare, for he often cannot tell friend from foe. He is in a fog in more ways than one.

Actor O'Connell does a fine job as Hook, and director Yann Demange does a terrific job in making the audience feel “there”--whether in the midst of a riot or during a wrenching scene of a medical procedure done without anesthesia in an apartment. Demange clearly has learned much from such past masterpieces of urban political violence as Eisenstein's Strike! (1925), Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (1966) and Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947; also about “the troubles” in Northern Ireland). And if you see this movie, you will learn much—and be moved.

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) A truce signed in 1998 ended most of the violence in Northern Ireland and has held since then. (2) A cruel “game” sometimes played in Britain and Ireland involves a gang of youths stopping a single youth and asking if he is “a Man or a Dan or an old tin can.” A “man” would mean an Orangeman, a Protestant supporter of British rule in Ireland. A “Dan” would be an admirer of Daniel O'Connell, a 19th-century advocate of Catholic rights. Depending on the various loyalties of the gang and the lone youth and that youth's answer, the youth might either be embraced by the gang or kicked down the street like “an old tin can.” The dilemma for the youth, and the sad irony involved in the “game,” is that there would be no way of telling when the question was asked whether the gang was “Man” or “Dan.”