Kill the Irishman

Ray Stevenson plays Danny Greene, who ran the longshoreman union in Cleveland for a time in the '70s, but eventually got crosswise of the mob. You can guess how that ends for Danny. Like The Way Back, this is based on actual events, and like The Way Back, I don't know how much it fudges things.

Greene's an interesting character. He reads a lot, is always thinking about news avenues to explore, is bluntly honest, and isn't going to kiss anyone's butt.  Sometimes he's a pretty decent guy, and he's willing to call an unjust situation what it is when he sees it. That's what gets him in trouble with the mob; they say he's owes them some money they were giving him as a business loan. The money never made it to him, but they still expect him to repay them the money he never received. He calls bullshit on that, which the mob took about as well as you'd expect. He originally gets hooked up with them trying to get a friend with gambling debts out of trouble. He really did seem to have a principled opposition to the previous head of the union (played by Bob Gunton, the evil warden from Shawshank Redemption).

At the same time, no one made him go to his loan sharking acquaintance (played by Christopher Walken) to ask for money to start a restaurant. He knows this is a guy who loans people money, then has them beaten if they don't pay it back. Is he really surprised things might not be handled fairly? Maybe Greene tried banks first and they turned him down. Maybe he expected a friend to give him a better deal (why I don't know, he'd already experienced how unsentimental these guys are). Whatever his opposition to the previous union boss, Danny was quite content to reap the benefits of letting the local mob loot the containers as they sat in the dockyard.

Stevenson has this particular tone to his voice that reminds me a lot of Robert Mitchum, and I could see Mitchum playing this character. Tough guy, kind of ass, not always on the right side of the law, but tries to do right by people, and seems to inspire loyalty.

Val Kilmer's in there as a detective who narrates the story and was acquainted with Greene through their wives, but doesn't have much purpose otherwise. Vincent D'Onofrio plays the guy Danny's friend got in debt to, who later becomes his partner. There's a lot of solid actors in here, doing pretty well with the roles that are typical in movies about the mob. Lot of cursing, lot of talk about respect, lots of casual racist jokes flying every direction. It's the kind of stuff that I normally find dull or irritating about mob movies, but it doesn't bother me as much here. Probably because the film focuses primarily on Danny, and he cuts through a lot of that. He just gets to the point, doesn't stand on ceremony.