Irish Republican Army - film - 1997 - The Devil's Own

The Devil’s Own
Alan J. Pakula (dir.)
Columbia Pictures
1997
107 minutes

This is one of the many mediocre films found in the body of work produced by late director Alan J. Pakula.  Essentially, this film is about a New York City cop unwittingly housing a criminal from abroad.  For some reason that criminal is an expert assassin from the Irish Republican Army named Frankie McGuire, or ‘Frankie Angel’.  While this film represents members of a real paramilitary organization it has virtually nothing to do with the conflict in Northern Ireland, and presumably only imported an IRA man into the film to give it a sense of realism.

The Devil’s Own opens with a scene of murder, where Frankie as a young boy witnesses his father’s assassination in their family home.  Cut to the present and Frankie is one of the IRA’s most proficient operatives. His urban warfare abilities are almost immediately put on display In a shootout scene between Provos and police where Frankie manages to shoot a lot of law enforcement personnel before escaping through some neighborhood yards.  Frankie’s organization then facilitates his relocation to the United States, where he lives under an alias with the family of an Irish NYC police officer named Tom O’Meara.  The trip to the US was dual-purpose, hide from British authorities, and oversee a shipment of weapons back to Ireland.  Much of the film is about the friendship that develops between O’Meara and Frankie (known to the cop as Rory Devaney), and some New York gangsters that want to interfere with the arms deal (Frankie, being the gun expert he is, kills a whole lot of tough guys single-handedly in the scene where they try to rip him off).  Over time, Frankie’s true identity is uncovered and while the IRA operative tries to escape, by boat, back to Ireland with the weapons, Frankie badly wounds O’Meara and O’Meara fatally wounds Frankie. It's not a great movie and while the film at first appears to be about cycles of violence that cross generations, in the end the IRA aspect seems like a means of adding novelty to a boring police drama.  


Apparently the film was very different in its development stages, it had a much deeper focus on the IRA, but the film was changed by Hollywood experts and production geniuses, and so what anyways? What I described above was the film and apocyrphal tales of alternative possibilities no longer matter.
Here’s a little funfact:  apparently Brad Pitt, who plays Frankie McGuire, was attacked in West Belfast when he was hanging around with some real North Ireland tough-guys to prepare for his role in this film, so there you go. I guess some people still don't take it as a compliment to have their culture and lifestyles emulated by a Hollywood mediocrity for the pleasure of a distant audience.