‘In The Land Of Saints And Sinners’: Venice Review

Dir. Robert Lorenz. US/Ire. 2023. 106mins.

Oscar Wilde once said the only difference between saints and sinners is that saints have a past and sinners have a future. It’s a great title for a Liam Neeson lone-gunman Western set in a village in Ireland’s northwest county of Donegal in 1974; a place where sinners are thick on the ground. Take Finbar (Neeson), for example, who has been working as an assassin-for-hire for a local ‘bone-man’ (played by Colm Meaney) since ‘the end of the war’. That would be 30 years, and he doesn’t know why he does it, how he started or even who he is doing it for. Jack Gleeson is cast as a second hitman working out of the same one-horse-town: while things weren’t quite right in Ireland in the 1970s, they weren’t quite that wrong either.

 Follows a classic late-career Neeson template

The problem with a film like Saints And Sinners is that the McDonagh brothers have a lock on the land with films like The Guard or Banshees of Inisherin. If you try to play it straight, as Robert Lorenz does with a mythic Neeson silhouetted against the peat bog, audiences look for the joke. Much as the film’s classic Western visuals lean heavily into The Quiet Man, Saints And Sinners follows a classic late-career Neeson template. (Nobody will be surprised to read that the abuse of a young girl lifts his hit-man out of a moral torpor.) It’s a much-loved template though, and Kerry Condon gets stuck into her role as a murdering IRA nasty with considerable gusto: there will be blood, and there will be viewers too for Neeson’s return to Irish film-making. (And if anyone is casting for a villainess, boy, does Condon give them a potty-mouth bully-girl to think about.)

The action starts when the IRA bombing of a pub in Belfast goes wrong, killing three children as well as the targets. The hit squad, led by Condon’s c-word abusing Doineann, pelt out of the city and end up in Glenn Colmcille, knocking down the town’s welcome sign in the process. It’s a signal as to how sleepy the place is that local Garda O’Shea (Ciaran Hinds) comes out to investigate, finding a clue which will come in handy later on. Neeson’s Finbar nurses a vague flirtation with his neighbour whose husband is ill (‘he’s far too worse to be getting better,’ she says, unironically.)

Meanwhile, Finbar has been barrelling down south to Bantry in Cork (the other end of Ireland) to pick off his latest target. Who is he working for? It’s not the IRA, because when Doineann’s brother starts abusing a local child and he leaps in to try to lethally sort out the problem, the main threat is that the IRA will come after Finbar if he steps out of line. “I’ve made some bad choices since Margaret died,” muses Finbar about his late wife.

Lorenz, with screenwriters Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane, are intent on setting up a gunfight at Glenn Colmcille’s OK Corral as Finbar goes lone wolf on Doineann and her gang of bloodthirsty terrorists. The blues harp is dialled up; Finbar is reading ‘Crime And Punishment’. In order for this to succeed, though, Lorenz has to completely trim all the fat, and the 106 minutes here is a little too laggy. Sparkles of Irish charm, including Gleeson’s feckless gunman, or a gag about raisins in scones, or even Finbar’s jolly friendship with Garda O’Shea, could have been tightened up.

Still, though, Donegal doesn’t half look good. It’s even got the spare sunshine leftover from Banshees of Inisherin as the waves pound on the picture-perfect coast. The night-time shooting, as the film goes dark all round, has a classic air of the Hollywood noir, and the production makes good use of all locations, reproducing the 1970s on a budget which clearly wasn’t anything like Martin McDonagh had to play with. For some, that film was a little too bleak and the humour a bit too black: The Land Of Saints And Sinners will be the more palatable Irish thriller for those in that market. And Neeson looks as strong as ever in the ‘big lad’ role: he’s 71, and signs are that he will just keep on sinning – as long as there is a child in distress.