Blarney meets brutality

This rambunctious Irish movie has a Dickensian sprawl of characters, all vying for attention in a multi-stranded plot that links Colin Farrell's putative bank robber with Kelly MacDonald's demure adulteress and Cillian Murphy's forlorn supermarket shelfstacker with Shirley Henderson's mustachioed ugly duckling.

Towering above them all, and giving an extraordinary performance, is Colm Meaney as a publicity-hungry cop hellbent on putting bad boys behind bars - and his own face on the telly.

A screen debut for both the theatre director John Crowley and dramatist Mark O'Rowe, the film attempts to create the same kind of polynarrative that Robert Altman achieved in Short Cuts, and Richard Curtis attempts in Love Actually.

While the ambitious structure occasions the odd character casualty, its overall effect is pleasingly vivid; gritty off-centre Dublin locations are peopled with a gaggle of disenchanted losers and the mix is mischievously peppered with violence and comedy.

The opening scene alone, in which Farrell sweettalks a susceptible young waitress before erupting into sudden and shocking violence, will grip the audience by the lapels and give it a good shaking. If some of the subsequent scenes drift into obscurity, there is plenty of salty dialogue and lunatic detail that will retain your attention until the plot gets back on course.

BROWN sauce, for example, is an unusual replacement for sugar in some characters' coffee. And the use of the word " Ronnie" to describe another's moustache may exercise those in the audience who don't remember the fine facial adornment sported by Ronald Coleman.

Latest figures reveal that this is Ireland's most successful film to date, in respect of its home box office. Clearly, it has caught the zeitgeist of contemporary Irish life in all its abrasive semi-urban glory.

Intermission
Cert: cert18