User Reviews

When his plans to pay back a €1,000 debt go awry, scruffy criminal Cillian Murphy, the girl he loves (Jodie Whittaker) and his dying dad (Jim Broadbent) have to stay one step ahead of Brendan Gleeson's goons, who want to lop off his willy and put it up his bottom. Given the cast, this crime-comedy is a big disappointment, with a poor, mannered script of the type currently entrancing the Irish Film Board: a torrent of swearing and a show-off's vocabulary intending to compensate for a complete absence of anything to say. Man. Sorry, everyone in the film says "Man" all the time, like it's 1967 (or Manchester in 1998). Films like Brick really did create their own vernacular; this isn't how you do that. The movie is also saturated in the kind of obvious post-modern irony of which The Guard was sometimes guilty. Gleeson gives an excellent performance and Murphy and Broadbent are both quite good, but it's a smug and unsatisfying film, the agreeable invention of parts of the plotting and a handful of nice lines obliterated by a blizzard of bull faeces and a climactic death scene that is a new kind of rubbish. Perrier's Bounty sounds like a two- for-one at WHSmith. That it's actually less inspiring than that is probably a criticism.

I picked up on a couple of reviews of PERRIER'S BOUNTY in the daily newspapers and thought - that is worth a look over!! Good cast - Brendon Gleeson Liam Cunningham Jim Broadbent Cillian Murphy et al - and a story of the shady underworld inhabiting Dublin......drugs, guns, violence, dog fights and other such delights.

So today I packed myself off to the local multiplex and gladly bought my ticket.

The premise goes that Michael (Murphy) owes Perrier (Gleeson) a sum of money, which he hasn't got - two of Perrier's thugs tell him he has four hours to find the money - or he will have two bones broken. That sets him haring off to the local dive looking for The Mutt (Cunningham), the local loan shark. The Mutt tells Michael he is short - but is doing a job that night and needs a third man...

So starts a hectic forty eight hours for Michael as he has run-ins with his father (Broadbent), the girl in the flat below, her on/off lover, two sadistic car clampers, the local dog fraternity, the snooker hall drug pusher, the ASBO-dodging car thieves.......I could go on, mentioning the double-crossing and the underlying love story triumvirate.

Funny in parts but more chuckle-some than guffaws, the whole leaves you wanting more meat to chew over - there is not much to bring you in to the story completely. When it concludes - and I had a doubting question over the way it ends, up in the hills (not to give it away but there WOULD be repercussions after the fact) - it leaves you with a sense of it having just petered out.

I give this film a seven out of ten - the violence is gritty and realistic - Brendon Gleeson is a marvel! - but is bogged down by unnecessary plot angles and sidelines. A tighter script would have made this experience more enjoyable.

Granted, this movie had its share of moments, but it's still more dependent in the comedy spectrum which is a bit misleading in its billing as an action comedy and the humor might be easier to decipher if you were from the land of the Celtics. "Intermission" helmsman Ian Fitzgibbon exhibits "Perrier's Bounty" is an overall letdown as it merely touches the pinnacles of comedy that "Intermission" displayed in spite of a very pedestrian plot.

Cillian Murphy stars as a young bloke who's in a financial predicament as he owes 1000 smackers to a local hoodlum. After several attempts in earning the dough, his neighbor unintentionally murders one of the hoodlum's accomplices. This puts Michael, his neighbor and his father (Jim Broadbent)in a deeper hole as they are now on the run. Sure it sounds like a crime caper with a touch of humor, but it's overall a misnomer. It's just a standard comedy as Perrier (played by Brendan Gleeson)has a few minutes of screen time and his presence is seen during the dying hours of the film. The centerpiece of the film is on the failed relationship between Michael and his father. Some of the humor is quite hilarious, but most of them are staler than age-old bread. It starts to fizzle in the middle, but recovers in the conclusion when the hoodlums become the center of attention.

The acting was very impressive overall, though Jim Broadbent's accent was a bit hard to decipher at times. The main scene stealer is Cillian Murphy who really shows his comical talent and Michael was the funniest of the zany bunch.

Not a terrible film by far, but just lacks the qualitative humor that "Intermission" possesses. And knowing the ensemble of talented Irish performers, this movie should have been 10x better.

Cillian Murphy owes money to Perrier a crime lord and has hours to pay him back. Wandering around through Dublin he tries to get the money, deal with a girl, his dying father and other crazies crossing his path.

Amusing but just misses being great romp wanders through the territory of Tarantino and Guy Richie to often occasional funny results. Its well made and well done but there is something about it that made me wish it were trying less hard. What bothered me about the film is that there is so much the film gets right that when it fails to come together you're rather disappointed. I liked it more than I should.

Worth a look but wait for a rental or cable, full movie price is too much

This is an urban Irish crime-comedy, so between the slang and the sort of accents where Michael is pronounced MOY-cul, I'm sure I missed some of the subtleties of Perrier's Bounty. I think I got the gist of it, though, and what I understood was pretty good. I'm not sure if the cavalcade of colorful characters who sprint through this tight but sparse little story are reflective of true Irish self-image or if they're playing to the prejudices of cinema tourists. Either way, they're a fun group with which to spend a fast hour and a half.

Michael (Cillian Murphy) is a low-level denizen of Ireland's criminal underworld, which isn't so much under anything as sort of off to the side and behind the local pub. I always love how British films treat crime as though it was just another vocation. American thieves and killers are always cast as outlaws. With the Brits, it's like some people simply grow up to be gangsters the way others grow up to be mechanics or butchers or meter maids. It gives their crime stories a refreshing workaday sensibility.

Anyway, Michael owes a thousand Euro to his local crime boss, Perrier (Brendan Gleeson). He doesn't have it and faces the prospect of two broken bones if he can't come up with it in a few hours. Michael's also got to deal with the girl he clearly loves (Jodie Whittaker) getting strung along by her douchebag boyfriend. Then his estranged "Da", that's "Dad" to us Yanks, shows up in what appears to be one of Don Johnson's Miami Vice outfits after it's been dipped in ink and proclaims that he's dying. As if that's not enough, when Perrier's thugs come to collect, one of them winds up dead and that means Michael is facing a lot worse that a couple of fractures. With a 10,000 Euro bounty on one side, his melancholy but surprisingly violent father on another, his unspoken love's heartbreak on a third side and an unresolved conflict with his mother on a fourth, Michael is boxed in and needs a hell of a lot of Irish luck to get out alive.

About the only complaint I have with this movie is that the character of Perrier, though ably brought to life by Brendan Gleeson, never lives up to his advance billing. He's repeatedly referred to and built up in the viewer's mind. Then as soon as he shows up on screen, the character is sidetracked into this homosexual tolerance digression that's amusing at first but just becomes puzzling as it goes on and on. I can appreciate the dramatic logic of leading the audience's expectations in one direction and then going a different way, but the character of Perrier is left stumbling out of the gate and never finds his footing. This story needed a great comic but still threatening villain and Perrier's personality and agenda never congeal enough to make him that. There are too many times when Perrier is put in service to the Almighty Plot Hammer to make him a real enough antagonist for Michael.

As for everything else, it's a delight. Jim Broadbent is particularly good as an irresolute old dude forced into action by his looming mortality and there's a pleasant depth to the relationship between Michael and his father. You can feel the layers of history between them in their dialog and you can see in their behavior how the two are similar and how they're separate. There are also quite a few funny lines, though frequently a bit hard to decipher, honestly humorous situations and even some gratuitous nudity. And while this isn't an intricate plot, there are more than enough times when it heads in an unexpected direction to keep you glued to what's going on.

Perrier's Bounty is a clever and energetic piece of entertainment. If I could have figured out everything that was said, I probably would have liked it even more.

Running dry of ideas for DVDs from video rental, we happened upon this one.

In general I like British comedies, and "Trainspotting" is one of my favorites. But some of them also fall flat for me. I will add "Perrier's Bounty" to that list of the latter.

Brendan Gleeson is Darren Perrier, an Irish mobster who takes his loans very seriously.

Cillian Murphy is Michael McCrea, who is a bit of a slacker and finds himself with just a few hours to get the cash to keep the goons off him.

Perhaps the best character is old faithful Jim Broadbent as Jim McCrea, Michael's dad.

As with most British and Irish movies of this sort, lots of 'blue' language is used, and is off-putting. But that is the genre. It was somewhat entertaining but mostly wasted time watching it.