Patriots

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!

i went on a realflix viewing spree recently and watched several independent films recommended by that site. "patriots" was one of those movies.

before writing this review, i noticed the previous reviewer's distaste for this picture but, to be honest, i don't share his view. you can certainly tell this movie was shot low budget-- there are no stars i recognized-- but i found the characters believable and the plot compelling.

i would caution viewers not to expect Hollywood here... this is an example of film-making on a shoe-string-- with that in mind, i give it a higher mark. still, it would have been nice to see a few more dollars thrown at this one.

You can tell from the moment the film began it was a low budget movie. Yet historically, those who joined the Irish Republican Army were mostly from lower income/working middle class families so the low budget filming and actors makes it more real. The acting is not superb but I felt the action and plot were developed very well. For the most part the intensity builds nicely especially at the scenes when the girl is hiding out with the woman who owned the pub. Its based on a true story and I did not think the lead actor did a great job of capturing the audiences attention span nor did she come off as genuine. Yet I did enjoy seeing the suspense build watching the UVA and IRA trying to hunt her down. The last scene was full of suspense and kept me drawn to the movie.

If you enjoy movies based on the Troubles and Civil War that took place in Ireland, then this is a solid film to watch. There are a few twists in the movie and several characters such as Belle and Damien who have such strong personalities that add flare to the story line and focus of the film.

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.

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!