Australian actor James Frecheville leads this thin, draggy revenge thriller about Ireland’s potato famine. Set in 1847 and playing out in both English and subtitled Gaelic, director Lance Daly’s film uses genre to tell the horrors of colonialism, including archaic tax laws that see decrepit houses de-roofed and Roman Catholics forced to “take the soup” or else starve. We witness these bleak, frostbitten scenes through the blank eyes of cowboy figure Feeney (Frecheville), on a one-man mission to avenge the death of his family.
It’s unfortunate that caricatured villains lessen the impact of the film’s upward punch. Freddie Fox’s smug, silvery-haired Officer Pope has a touch of Draco Malfoy about him, while Jim Broadbent’s Lord Kilmichael is so openly offensive that he feels like a punchline.
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