Intermission

Color, R (mature themes, violence, language, sexual situations), 106 min., DVD $19.95, VHS $27.50

DVD: no extras

Street: Oct. 19, Prebook: Oct. 5

First Run: L, March 2004, $1 mil.

Cast: Colin Farrell (The Recruit), Shirley Henderson (Bridget Jones's Diary), Colm Meaney (Mystery, Alaska), Cillian Murphy (Cold Mountain)

MGM

Lehiff (Farrell), a petty crook with a violent streak, persuades his pal John (Murphy), a frustrated supermarket clerk, to join him in a bank robbery. The heist goes awry and the thieves are pursued by Jerry Lynch (Meaney), a brutal, self-aggrandizing cop who thinks he belongs on a TV reality show. Set in a gritty Dublin apparently populated only by foul-mouthed misfits, Intermission is a raucously funny ensemble piece that has at least a dozen principal characters and juggles nearly as many identifiable story lines. That's at least a half-dozen too many, of course, but director Crowley, a veteran of Irish theater, boils them down sufficiently to keep viewers engaged. The film draws inspiration from both Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, and it nearly reaches the same level of quality. That said, it should be recommended to fans of such and those of golden boy Farrell. --Ed Hulse

BACK TO TOP