PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
Hot on the heels of her critically acclaimed performance in The Contender, Joan Allen stars in When the Sky Falls, a straight-to-cable biopic about a ballsy investigative reporter who made a name for herself by fingering several of Dublin's most notorious drug kingpins. The film is a true story with fictionalized names based on The Sunday Independent's Veronica Guerin – the first Irish journalist ever to be assassinated.
Allen plays Sinead Hamilton, a reporter from the fictitious Sunday Globe. Her fearless style and penchant for sniffing out the truth aggravated the purveyors of organized crime in Ireland but made her a favorite daughter of Dublin. The film begins with the slaying of a character played by Pete Postlethwaite (Among Giants) that I think was supposed to have been Martin Cahill (whose life was dramatized in the far superior film The General). Falls is set over a two-year period in the mid ‘90s, where Hamilton's pieces on the country's most notorious criminals were gobbled up by readers that had grown exceedingly tired of Dublin's growing drug problems.
Allen does a good job but seems very miscast here. Her accent shows up only at the end of each sentence. The whole martyr thing was a little too much to take as well, but being a true story, you can't really complain too loudly about it. The story of Guerin's real assassination, while depicted somewhat accurately, is a lot more chilling than in Falls. For some reason, the filmmakers left out a call the journalist made to her home while she was being gunned down. Patrick Bergin (Eye of the Beholder) and Liam Cunningham (RKO 281) turn in decent supporting roles.
Falls was directed by John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday) and penned by three debut screenwriters – Ronan Gallagher, Colum McCann and Michael Sheridan. Guerin also collaborated on the screenplay in an attempt to tell the stories that her newspaper wouldn't. I'm sure she never envisioned her version ending quite like Falls. Her death, which occurred just eight months before Falls began principal photography, resulted in tough new Irish drug laws and a crackdown that netted 150 criminals.
1:47 – R for graphic violence, sexual content, drug use and adult language
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