The Irish banking bailout biopic is in cinemas from Thursday October 30. John Byrne crunches the numbers.
Based on Colin Murphy's play Guaranteed!, this film (also written by Murphy) aims to tell the story around the night the Irish Government infamously guaranteed the Irish banks and bankrupted the nation.
It's a sorry tale of politicians being played like children's putty by the big boys and bullies of Irish banking, but it's also a complex matter that would easily go over the heads of non-economist/financial types, and that's most folk, so therein lies a major problem with The Guarantee.
This film would've been up against it had it been bankrolled by Hollywood, but as an independent Irish production it faced the obvious financial and time constraints common to all film projects outside the latest franchise blockbuster.
Unfortunately, the relatively miniscule budget shows as the film seems to have been shot in a couple of rooms, a bar and a car. The cast is rather light in numbers, while some of the complexities are (un)explained away via on-screen quotes, headlines and jargon.
Best of all is David Murray, who is utterly convincing as the late Brian Lenihan Jr. You can almost feel the mental turmoil his character endured as the events around the Irish banking crisis gathered pace and the Government seemed to be placed in an impossible situation.
Peter Coonan coasts along as the obnoxious, potty-mouthed David Drumm, but also plays another role, the composite Central Banker, which led to some confusion at the screening. And as the jargon and on-screen data came and went, it felt more like an economist's screen jolly than a 'bailout-for-layfolk' sift through what happened in the lead-up to the night of September 29, 2008.
It's a brave effort at making a short film about an almost incomprehensible situation, but ultimately I came out of the cinema no wiser or more entertained than when I walked in 80 minutes earlier.
3/5
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