Cannes 2010: Ken Loach’s ‘Route Irish’ Is Another Iraq War Film We Don’t Really Need

If we asked yesterday do we need another Iraq war drama, today we’re asking if we really needed two of them In Competition at Cannes, screening on the same day. A last minute entry to the festival, Ken Loach’s “Route Irish” is not a straight dramatization of actual events like Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” but instead explores the damaged psyche of the men who return from the Middle East and are left on their own to try and heal the wounds left by what they’ve seen and the friends they’ve lost.

The film opens with the funeral for Frankie (John Bishop), a contractor for a Blackwater-esque type group who did work in Baghdad, killed on the most dangerous road in the world, Route Irish. His best friend Fergus (Mark Womack), is shattered by his friend’s death. A former member of the SAS, he had encouraged his friend to join the mercenary-for-hire group as the pay ($10,000 per month) would be too good to pass up even in the dangerous conditions of Iraq. The other advantage would be that they would be working alongside professionals, not kids with guns as they did in the national army. However, when Fergus hears the official story of his friend’s death, he has doubts and begins to investigate, and soon the troubling circumstances leading up to his friend’s death point to foul play.
The first discovery Fergus makes is that, a few weeks prior to Frankie’s death, he captured on a video cell phone members of his unit ruthlessly murdering a family traveling together in a taxi. Disturbed by what he witnessed, and anxious to do the right thing, Frankie began to talk about filing an official report about the incident. The leader of the unit, Nelson (Trevor Williams) obviously wanted the incident kept quiet and it wasn’t long before threats against his life began to surface. In tracking down the cell phone and the contents it contains, Fergus is horrified and believes more than ever that Nelson, described as an asshole renegade with a thirst for blood, is behind Frankie’s death. As Fergus begins to dig deeper and contacts people who knew Frankie and can shed light on the days leading up to his death, word reaches the top levels to the contracting company as well as Nelson himself.

Up until this point, the film is fine even though it does tend to over-reach more often than we would’ve liked with Frankie’s widow Rachel (Andrea Lowe) being drawn in to the proceedings for little reason other than to act as a surrogate for the audience, while Fergus gets to make a couple of speeches about the horrors he witnessed in Iraq and how blind the public have become to the whole thing. However, Loach and writer Paul Laverty’s disgust at the unparalleled, and moreover, unchecked violence by soliders-for-hire is completely negated by the film’s unbelievable and ridiculous second-half which firmly enters “Law Abiding Citizen” territory. After Nelson (who becomes an unintentionally comical, Vinnie Jones-esque villain) returns to London, trashes Rachel and Fergus’ respective apartments, and assualts their friend who was translating the material on the cell, Fergus kidnaps him, tortures the truth out of him (though, you would think for a guy who is so well versed in the ins and outs of everything that’s wrong with the Iraq, he would realize its probably not the the most effective way to get what he needs). Anyway, where it goes from here we’ll leave you to discover for yourself, but the catch phrase punctuated final climax is so groaningly hokey, for a moment we thought we were watching an ’80s era Cannon film.

We’re not going to get into the final ending, only to say that like the second half of the film, it circles the drain of the believability index. While Loach and Laverty do their best to illustrate the strain the lasting effects of war has on a brain made brittle, they surely could’ve used a lesson from Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.” What she conveys in the supermarket scene at the end of that film speaks far more loudly and clearly than the parallel scene of Fergus on the balcony of his apartment with an unloaded sniper rifle, taking aim at passing pedestrians. That scene alone is a fair indicator of the types of choices Loach and Laverty make time and again, to the increasing detriment of the film.

As we’ve noted, Iraq war film fatigue has settled in, and “Route Irish” will do little to alleviate it. Sidelined by a hysterical second and third act; blunted by overwrought imagery (one particularly manipulative sequence displays archival footage of Iraqis pulling bodies out of rubble as an Iraqi musician plays a song about his homeland). As a narrative that ends up waving its arms around to tell the audience how important is, “Route Irish” is an overly earnest, deeply misguided effort. [C]