The Long Good Friday
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Movie Reviews of The Long Good Friday
Movie Review: great but problematic film
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a film is that is nearly great. Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren turn great performances as a gangster couple in the London of the early 1970s. Mirren in particular gave her role a take almost never seen in this sort of film. She is a competent partner of Hoskins playing something closer to the corporate wife than the old-style gangster's woman. Nothing like her performance has been seen before or since.
Where the film goes wrong is that while it develops an elaborate mystery of who is attacking Hoskins, it gives an answer that isn't all that interesting. What we get is the Irish/IRA as a kind of faceless and nameless invincible monster. They are everywhere and seem to know everything while Hoskins (and everyone else in London) doesn't even know who they are. They don't speak, are rarely visually shown and amount to little more than ciphers within the film.
Hoskins made the role interesting by seeming competent, but by the end of the film he is made out to be a total fool. It would have been a better film if the Irish had been more human or (better yet) the complexities of Irish Loyalist and Nationalist gangsterism had been used. With more political dialog and a better ending, this film would have reached the level of greatness. As it is, its very, very good but flawed.
Movie Review: A must for any fan of the gangster/organized crime genre
Summary: 5 Stars
This flick shows us why people say "they don't make movies like they used to." The acting by Hoskins and Mirren in this film is superb, as well as the plot line. The soundtrack is great. I'm amazed this film isn't more widely known, but no matter. The Long Good Friday is the business.Movie Review: Diabolical!
Summary: 4 Stars
Seeing this one again brings back fond memories. An London crime boss is at the zenith of his influence & power when various events rise up and challenge his kingdom... who is responsible and who would dare challenge the undisputed boss in this way? While the conclusion isn't as satisfying as it might be, it was fun to see a young Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren tackle the gritty crime genre so early in their respective careers (1980). Look out too for a very young Pierce Brosnan as the gay pool boy.Movie Review: Top British Film
Summary: 5 Stars
This film, together with Get Carter (the original) are the two finest British crime/gangster films you can get.
Bob Hoskins gives his best ever performance as Harold Shand a cockney gangster whos trying to do a deal with an American over the (as was then) wasteland of London docklands. Unfortunately while he's in the states one of his gang has upset some rather nasty people. Upon his return things start to go badly wrong.
This film is full of great scenes - perhaps most memorably when the men Harold suspects are trying to muscle in on him are brought in hanging upsidedown from meathooks - Harold has a quiet word:
"For more than ten years there's been peace - everyone to his own patch. We've all had it sweet. I've done every single one of you favours in the past - I've put money in all your pockets. I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right? Well now there's been an eruption. It's like f**kin' Belfast on a bad night. One of my closest friends is lyin' out there in the freezer. And believe me, all of you, nobody goes home until I find out who done it, and why".
Its all marvellously done, and the ending is very clever indeed - you will never forget it once you've seen it. The whole film is complimented by excellent music composed by Francis Monkman (who played with Curved Air and Sky).
Helen Mirren gives a great peformance as Harolds wife/girlfriend. The cast includes quite a few familiar faces such as Eddie Constantine and P H Moriarty as 'Razors'. The most noteable is a small role for the as then unknown Pierce Brosnan.
This film is also an interesting piece of British history as you can see docklands as it was before before Canary Wharf existed.
If you haven't already seen this, then you've missed a really cracking film.
Movie Review: You're Not Going To Find It Easy To Forget
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Long Good Friday," (1980), made from an original script by Barrie Keefe, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, directed by John Mackenzie, makes just about everyone's short list of greatest British gangster movies. In fact, greatest gangster movies, period. It was nominated for a BAFTA (British Oscar) on its release. Gangster movies are said to depend on the energy and performance of their protagonists -- see George Raft, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson-- and this one made a star of Hoskins, who captured the explosive violence of its protagonist Harold Shand, a cockney gangster.
The late George Harrison, of The Beatles, served, among others, as the film's Executive Producer. The film opens on Good Friday, and is, in fact, full of Easter imagery. Shand's mother goes to mass; and scenes set in a slaughterhouse and a warehouse present specifically Christian iconography. "The Long Good Friday" is also set at a significant time, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's own Euro version of the greed-is-good 1980's. In fact, at moments, it almost seems the film is quoting Dante Aleghieri's famous Italian Renaissance poem "The Inferno," that also is set at Easter, and concerns the greed is good crowd of its own time and place. At any rate, the film makes good use of its era, as Michael Caine's memorable "Get Carter" did of Britain's sourly swinging 1970's.
Shand appears to be on the top of the world as the film opens. During Thatcher's reign, London's extensive docklands are just beginning to be profitably redeveloped, and he's getting in on the ground floor. He expects to get additional seed money for his projects from Charlie, a visiting American gangster, nicely played by that iconic French actor Eddie Constantine. Shand's got a gorgeous, upper crust, tough, sexy, smart mistress, Victoria; as played by Helen Mirren, nobody could doubt that she has her say in his organization. But while he's in the States, hooking up with Charlie, things begin to go wrong for him. And it takes him too long to figure out what's happening.
Pierce Brosnan, then evidently at the start of his career, has a bit, nearly non-speaking part: apparently he improvised one line, and it stuck. But he plays a bare-chested pool scene, showing off a fine body, and a charming smile, but, oh, those terrible not-yet-improved-to-American standards teeth! And he drives the car in the movie's gripping final scenes. Hoskins and Mirren give remarkable performances, together and on their own, never more so than these final, almost wordless scenes together. You're not going to find them easy to forget.