What Richard Did

I almost enjoyed the film but the dialogue was poor and left the film wanting.To be fair the film did have some half decent acting from a young cast and the film ticked along nicely holding my interest throughout.The setting did seem more like the kind of Ireland i grew up in myself during the Celtic tiger.

I doubt this film will be winning awards but it was a decent watch all the same.So just to have a bit of a moan i have to say my major gripe with the film was how annoying the lead actors accent was.This might be a slight exaggeration but it felt as if every second word that came out of his mouth was "like" it really began to grate on me.I honestly don't think i could have "like" taken much more of it "like" you know what i mean "like".

'What Richard Did' is a bit of a slow burn, but it's complex and often emotional, consistently anchored by an amazingly ambiguous and complicated performance from Jack Reynor.

The title of this Irish film, What Richard did, contains the excitement right from before you start watching. A neat trick, if you like to create interest, and this does the trick. The script is based on a novel "Bad day in Block Rock" by Kevin Power, which again was inspired by real events.

The film invited us into some youngsters every day Irish life, just outside Dublin. 18 year old Richard Karlsen, obviously the main character, is a sympathetic sports (rugby) guy, and what you would reckon a young alpha male. Irish mother, Danish father, living a normal life. Attractive, serious, sportive and a leader of the pack of youngsters. Not a smoker, but still does, occasionally. Well we're introduced to his holiday life during summer. Happy non important days around a guy with has everything going for him. Even gets a girlfriend, which seems like a perfect match to him.

Great acting all over. Jack Reynor is amazing, and so is his father, Danish Lars Mikkelsen, as always. They're important, but the whole cast is brilliant, which tells us what a great instructor the director Lenny Abrahamson obviously is. Very true, very realistically told, and as far away from what would have been told in a Hollywood film as possible. A very accurate portrait. The film does a terrific job in introducing us to the persons gallery. Beautifully told, and obviously very important if you want to make a film like this with a real punch.

I love realistically told movies like this. We really get inside Richard's feelings, the agonizing pain he suffers from afterwards. The despair. Slowly told, using a lot of silence, this might not be suitable for the one's seeking action. This is a drama which outright tells what a situation like this is, not putting in extra dramatically points to color up the story. I lived the way the camera is used to express thoughts and feeling, showing how it is to be living with guilt.

The film has a very important message. It's very easy to do acts under the influence of alcohol. It may ruin lives in just a bad decision. Things like thick force not only have one victim, is has several, and it'll also easily ruin both the innocence, the friendship and at least a part of the future, making marks which never fully mend. There's many living with this pain around, a pain which will always be there.

I definitely sought this out because I was a big fan of the director's recent film Room. His directorial hand is sort of similar here, in terms of giving a lot of weight and true significant to the little details in character interactions, and in terms of each half of the film being primarily centered around a different development (although the first half of this is basically set-up and character development so the second half hits harder, and boy does it do a great job of that). I thought all of the performances here were very refined and pretty realistic. The actors do a great job of really inhabiting their characters and making the most out of small moments with he director's help. Overall, very effective film, moves along nicely and a very powerful morality act. That ending is genius.

What worked:

• the ambiance and the setting of the movie goes in the right direction in the first half of the movie, good enough for the viewers to understand and sympathize with the lead characters

What did not work:

• the movie did not hit the right mark or at least to the extend to make the audience feel the overwhelming tension of the situation. In my opinion, more could have been done to conclude the movie, maybe a different perspective or more scenes to support the point.

Final verdict: It's okay but not a movie that you need not miss.