Kill the Irishman Explodes on DVD & Blu-ray June 14, 2011
Kill the Irishman (2011), based on the true story of Danny Greene, 1970’s Cleveland crime figure, is nothing if not explosive. There are so many explosions that it makes the battle scenes of Platoon look like backyard firecrackers. The cast includes nearly as many I’m-not-a-mobster-I-just-play-one-in-the-movies names as Goodfellas--including Paul Sorvino, Christopher Walken, Robert Davi, Tony Darrow, Tony Lo Bianco, Steve Schirripa, and Mike Starr.
Ray Stevenson leads the cast as Danny Greene, a dockworker who became a union leader but was disgraced and barred for life from union activities. Vincent D’Onofrio is his close friend and partner in crime, John Nardi, and Val Kilmer appears as a cop who was Greene’s boyhood friend.
Because “a man’s gotta work,” Greene moves onto a job as a mob enforcer. There is nothing to like about Greene—he’s a thug and a killer with little charm. When Greene’s wife leaves him, the audience wonders, “What took her so long?” and feels little sympathy for the man who is losing his family. As he goes about his business, moving up in the crime world, he alienates more and more people who try to kill him—again and again and again.
Greene was fearless, brutish, and—above all else—lucky. There are at least five assassination attempts in Kill the Irishman, each one resulting in revenge assassinations. When Greene is tipped off that one of his buddies is about to drop a dime, Greene has him rig a bomb to the car of someone else he’s supposed to eliminate. While his buddy is rigging the bomb, Greene sets it off.
Kill the Irishman is gritty and downbeat, the world it portrays depressing in its callousness and easy violence. Despite its fine cast, the film disappointingly lacks the energy of other based-on-truth mob flicks.
There were thirty-six bombs detonated in the 1976 Cleveland turf war in which Greene took on “the Cosa Nostra.” Kill the Irishman is peppered with archival news films, and the DVD/Blu-ray includes a documentary, Danny Greene: The Rise and Fall of the Irishman which promises a more intimate look at the real Greene, featuring interviews with those who knew him.
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