Film Review: The Long Good Friday (1980)
It is difficult to imagine a gangster film that with a main description of being “prophetic”. When something like that actually happens, results might be extraordinary. One of such events is 1980 British film The Long Good Friday directed by John Mackenzie, nowadays hailed as a genre classic.
Protagonist, played by Bob Hoskins, is Harold Shands, London gangland boss who has returned from New York, where he had negotiated a business deal that would be the crowning achievement of his career. His dream is to transform abandoned and derelict London Docklands into massive office complex that would help London become financial capital of the world. He hopes that the project would help him transition into legitimate businessman and member of the elite. But, just as he spends Easter weekend entertaining his American partners led by Charlie (played by Eddie Constantine), his organisation gets rattled by the series of brutal assassinations and spectacular bombings. Shands is baffled, because all of his enemies are either dead, intimated or unable to stage attack of such scale, so he desperately tries to find who is behind this campaign, while at the same time attempting to prevent Charlie from finding what was going on and abandoning the deal. Shands’ girlfriend Victoria (played by Helen Mirren) begins to suspect that the source of the problem might be from within the organisation. Her instincts prove right when it turns out that some of Shands’ employees used his absence for their own shady deal with IRA that went disastrously wrong.
At first glance, The Long Good Friday doesn’t look like a great film. It was originally made for television and director Mackenzie, although doing his job competently, never attempts to hide its relatively low budget with some “clever” visual tricks or experiments with style. Even the music score by Francis Monkman sounds unremarkable. What elevates this film is superb acting by Bob Hoskins in his first starring role. Shands is portrayed as arrogant, incredibly violent and extremely dangerous individual for anyone who are near him when he gets angry, but Hoskins also adds him certain a little intelligence, awareness of his humble roots and some roguish charm that helps win over partners from higher levels of social hierarchy. Hoskins’ performance made Shands very convincing character; it is quite understandable how such character can advance from the dirty street into the luxurious penthouse, and it is also believable how such character might succumb to his arrogance and lose it all. Hoskins is helped by a very good cast (which includes Pierce Brosnan in his film debut as IRA assassin) and has good chemistry with Helen Mirren, who abandons cliches about gun molls and instead plays Victoria as sophisticated worldy woman who is actual brain behind Shands’ empire.
What ultimately won critics and helped this film maintain stellar reputation over the decades is script by Barrie Keefe which puts relatively simple story about mobster’s fall into broader social, economic and political context. The most obvious deviation from traditional genre conventions is a subplot that links British organised crime with long and exhausting conflict in Northern Ireland, which would, by an interesting coincidences brought to end by Good Friday Agreement. But, Keefe goes beyond the British Isles and portrays increasingly globalised world where former national boundaries mean little and where faceless multinational corporations, very much like Shands’ partners, run all the shots. Old values like honour and commitment to local community are abandoned and replaced by individualistic greed and unrestrained capitalism that would characterise 1980s. An emerging world, best described by Thatcher’s words “There is no such thing as society”, is seen here within Shands’ organisation, where the desire for few extra pounds starts chain of events that would end in apocalyptic bloodbath. Yet, despite being built on such seemingly weak basis, Thatcher’s and Blair’s Britain succeeded in what unfortunate protagonist of this film could not. London Docklands with its mighty buildings serves as the monument to wealth and power built on globalised economy and unrestrained financial speculation.
RATING: 7/10 (++)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14807-the-long-good-friday
Critic: AA