The Spoiler's Review: Blackbird

 I finally saw Michael Flatley's legendary Blackbird. 

It's ridiculous, of course. The dialogue is hilarious. The characters paper-thin. The female ones either troubled blondes, scorned and vengeful brunettes, or dead wives. The McGuffin is a microtape (!) for a panacea that can cure all pain and suffering, but "if you change one element of the formula it could kill millions". You might want to get that peer-reviewed. Get it down to Laboratoire Garnier, get some white coats crowding round the test tube. That sounds dangerous. 

It's a spy film imagined by a nine year old boy who's just come out of Octopussy, wide eyed. Flatley plays Victor Blackley, a secret agent known as "Blackbird", the leader of a faction of Irish spies working out of Westminster. Okay. They're known as "The Chieftains", and I'm going to assume they're the best of the best. But we don't know that, because now it's ten years later and Victor is the manager of a hotel in the Caribbean. 

He's a tortured man, is Victor. He doesn't say much. But he stares very intently at literally everything, as if to import the great meaning that isn't in the script. Actually, he frequently looks as if the Imodium has just worn off and he's about to ruin another slightly too small white tuxedo. Victor's wife is dead, and he's unhappy about it. We eventually find out he failed to save her from being burned at the stake. She's the only character in this film with an arc, and it's Joan of! 

I expected so much from this film but what I didn't expect was how staggeringly uneventful it is. Nothing happens. There's glowering. Flatley looking distant and troubled, as though he's worried about leaving a stain on his bar stool. People sit around listening to anodyne jazz hits. The camera lists lazily across the screen. Tight close-ups communicate blankness. It is a cavernously empty film. It echoes. If someone dropped a fork on set it would ring out like a gunshot. 

The action, when it comes, is both perfunctory and ineptly realised. A giant black henchman, who has been giving Blackbird daggers all through the film, finally wants to throw fists, and Blackbird, a tiny pensioner, dispatches him in about five punches, easily killing him. Blackbird is then pulled off him, and goes down to the beach to drink a bottle of whiskey and cry. 

When Blackbird wakes up on the white sand beach in the morning, he looks at the empty bottle and flings it away. Just in case you'd forgotten he'd been drinking in the previous scene. He then goes off to settle some scores, telling his local priest, a white English man, for some reason, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. And I'm about to sin again." All the action in the film is saved for the last ten minutes and Blackbird does his violence with a whiskey hangover. 

The showdown involves arch baddie, Eric Roberts, saying improbably confident things to Blackbird, who is once again in a slightly too small white tuxedo. Eric is flanked by three henchman and three other toughs surround Blackbird. They escort him behind a van to be murdered, for some reason, and we hear a scuffle and gunfire and Eric assumes that Blackbird is dead and does a big, wolfish grin. No way, though, because it's Blackbird who emerges from behind the van covered in blood, throwing his jacket away, with two guns tucked into his straining cummerbund. Blackbird has killed four men in the last few minutes of film, three of them black, and three of them off screen. Ballsy film making. 

Inexplicably, and even when Blackbird's mate Ian Beattie turns up, Eric is still confident of killing Flatley, even though he now has fewer henchman than he's just seen Blackbird destroy bare fisted and on his own. Well, he didn't see it. He, like the rest of us, only heard the massacre. We do see Eric's death though, and from above. It lasts about a second as they just fire guns and the baddies fall down. Somehow Ian Beattie sustains a broken arm during this scrape. 

It's shit. It's silly. It's boring. It's old fashioned. But it's worth it for the hats. The hats in this film are incredible. Those hats. Flatley attends his wife's funeral in the pissing Irish rain in a jaunty, black fedora, the angle so rakish you keep expecting Sideshow Bob to step on it. During the film he peeks out from an impressive array of headwear, from ice white caps to banana Nesquik trilbies. In one scene, and it's my favourite scene in the entire film - I laughed out loud - Blackbird, who has been unpacking crates of rum from the back of a lorry, switches hats mid-scene, and actually has a lackey standing by holding a hat for him, he hands her his used hat without even looking at her. Incredible. It's like Prince's socks - Blackbird will never wear the same hat twice. And always with a Fosse tilt when he does. The hats are the star of this show. They get a lot of screen time. The camera loves them. 

Roger Moore is an executive producer! 

But its a different Roger Moore. That's a shame. 

That's a real shame.