Patriots

Alexis Shannon, a naïve Irish-American grad student in Boston, is recruited by a charming young Irishman out of a waterfront pub to help the IRA blow up a loyalist paramilitary headquarters facility in Belfast. Eager to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, a soldier in the Irish War for Independence, Alexis sets sail that very evening. The plan appears to work smashingly, but it turns out the recruiter is not what he seems. Alexis finds herself abandoned by her new friends and is forced to take cover in the dark streets of Belfast. As she struggles to find a way back across the sea, Alexis discovers both sides of the conflict are far less monolithic, and far more capable of duplicity and perfidy, than she could ever have imagined, with just a ray of hope somewhere on the horizon.

Ostensibly this is based on a true story. As near as I can tell, it is a *very* loose adaptation of the true tale of John McIntyre's gunrunning on the intercepted S. S. Valhalla, grafted onto a far more innocent, almost "gal-next-door," profile. There were, to be sure, Irish-American Troubles-era gunrunners who fit that bill, though few females that I'm aware of and McIntyre was certainly no "boy next door." The movie is set in a frame story and opens with Alexis turning evidence to the U. S. Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms, a narrative choice which serves mostly to buckle a chilling but obscure link in the conclusion, similarly to what we know of McIntyre. While Alexis's self-critical narrative emerges as credible, she dodges so many lies and so many shady characters that the final truth, here as in the McIntyre drama, must be left to speculation.

Some have reproached the script's refusal to "pick a side," though that was a pretty good move for painting the personal journey of an adventuress who jumped headfirst into a cause she deemed noble but hardly understood at all. The personalities of most of the paramilitaries/terrorists here, whether Republican or Loyalist, come off as rather singular and wooden, though one must remember these were hardened men trying to put on a hard face to march ahead in righteous conflict. The film is obviously low-budget, but for a depiction of the hardhat sections (in the geographic AND demographic sense) of Boston and Belfast that actually works quite well. There's a kind of "seedy prosperous poverty" in every shot which really puts you in the zone. That said, the subpar acting - especially on the part of the leading lady - and the artificial accents are a definite sore point for this movie, and prevent the suspenseful and thoughtful plot progression from drawing us all the way in.

To the best of my knowledge, there aren't many other movies that explore the American involvement in the Troubles, from political lobbying and fundraising to gunrunning and, yes, vigilante intervention. This one is interesting for its study of a highly anecdotal and ad hoc iteration of that involvement, though the much "grander" story is I think still waiting to be told on film at any rate. If you're into all things Irish and enjoy true-to-life suspense thrillers, this is definitely worth your time, despite its technical limitations and professional flaws.

A terrible, awful, amateurish, attempt at making a movie. It has not one redeeming thing in the 80 long minutes it runs for. The acting, the directing, the dreadful storyline, the appalling script. This film should be used in film schools as an example of how not to do it.

How does such rubbish get made. I guess that a glance at the credits shows it was made on a very low budget with possibly amateur actors and crew. I read the write up on this board before I watched it and expected better. Unfortunately, while there are many great films that are still unobtainable on DVD there are thousands of real turkeys.

This site is normally a reasonable guide to lesser known movies but unfortunately sometimes there is not enough information.

I only watched the first half hour of this. I just couldn't go on watching such a train wreck.

Firstly, I'm extremely sceptical that this is a true story, or even based on a true story. I'm no fan of the IRA, Provisional or otherwise, but their dialogue and actions are far from any reality in Belfast. The IRA were ruthless terrorists and murderers, but they were as professional as such an organisation can be. This movie depicts them like characters from the USA Wild West era.

All the characters who were supposed to be from Belfast had fake Republic of Ireland or fake stereotyped 'Oirish' accents. Not one of them had a Belfast accent, or even anything close to a Northern Irish accent.

The acting was shoddy, though I think that was due more to poor directing, terrible script and the struggles the actors had with trying to get the WRONG accent and turn-of-phrases right.

Apart from one scene in the first half hour which panned across the Belfast skyline, none of the rest of it appeared to be actually filmed in Belfast.

I would suggest that anyone interested in the Troubles avoid this movie but then again, few films about the Troubles rise above the level of mediocre.

In fact, avoid this film whether you are interested in the subject matter or not!

My comments here focus more on the technical and post-production aspects. The director and author of the film, Frank Kerr worked with my brother Michael Phillips, Tom O'Hanian and myself as we had just launched our post-production facility The Edit House. The was a beta-site for Avid Technologies brand-spanking new, frame-accurate 24fps digital editing system then known as the Avid Film Composer. As I recall the movie originated on Agfa negative stock, was transferred to videotape at (will fill in soon), and we The Edit House took it from there. The complexities of going from one format, film recorded at 24fps, going to interlace video aka 89.94 fields per second, digitizing not just the film rolls, but all the associated metadata (before metadata was "a thing") via FlexFiles; tracking the source audio from 1/4" Nagra (special thanks to John Garrett ;), syncing in the Avid editing system, organizing the several hours on source material so that the editor could be as productive as possible with the new power of random- access, non-destructive editing! We are talking 1996, remember. As editing moved forward, and pick-up scenes were added, the excitement just kept growing at the quality of Frank's film as it moved from organized bins to rough-cut and eventually to final version. We had the opportunity to work with the DigiDesign/Avid AudioVision (thanks Darren Abrams), which we brought to Soundtrack at Finish Post in Boston, where the final sound design and audio re-recording took place. We as post support learned a lot from the experience, as did the 'film engineers' at Avid at the time -there were some painful moments once in a while depending on the laboratory, but all issues were addressed by AVid's crew, by the labs and by The Edit House folks, naturally!

Purportedly based upon a true story, this film depicts the circumstances surrounding the recruitment of a naive young American graduate student by the IRA who want to use her to infiltrate and blow up the headquarters of a Loyalist paramilitary group in Belfast.It turns out however that the recruiter is something other than what he represents (not giving the plot away here), and while the bombing plan succeeds the rest of the story is all about the perfidy and cynicism of all the parties to the Irish "troubles". What I liked about this obviously low-budget melodrama was that it tried to show the dark side of bright and shining 'causes'. What it failed to do however was to rise above cliche in its depiction of the characters involved. I found the portrayal of the IRA as sadistic brutes to be a bit over the top and it failed to address at all the dark side of Loyalism, which, since the 1990's, makes the IRA seem almost moderate. In short the film fails miserably to tell the real story of what is happening in Belfast and instead gives us a stock Perils of Pauline melodrama with the main hero being, yep you guessed it, a Belfast Prod with a Heart of Gold. Political movies work best when they take a stand. Trashing all parties in a conflict in the name of peace is not only limp-wristed, but also a bit dishonest and we never get to hear from the poor woman again because she was taken into the warm embrace of the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms...I would really like to know how she feels about her experience now.