Black '47

A solider (James Frecheville) in the King's Army returns home to Ireland during the potato famine years. He's not pleased with what he sees. The starvation, families being kicked out of their homes by English lords so they can save on taxes, a legal system that doesn't represent the Irish. The film spends a fair amount of time on that. How you could get some soup if you renounced the Catholic Church and accepted the Church of England. The people starving outside the lord's estate while the grain gets shipped to England. How the layer or servility and politeness the Irish carry is wafer-thin, and there's a lot of anger an resentment.

The United States clearly learned a lot from them.

When the last of his family dies because of this cruelty, he decides to go John Wick on some people's asses. The man who kicked his mother out of her home, the judge who ordered his brother hanged, the bailiff and so on.

That can't be tolerated, the Irish getting the notion they should be treated as people with rights, so the British send a snot-nosed Captain after him, and bring in a former commanding officer (Hugo Weaving) to help track Feeney. Of course, the longer things go, the more he sees, the less Weaving wants to help kill a man who served him and the Crown loyally (until he deserted, but I don't blame him for that. Why die for Britain in Afghanistan?) and came home to all this. Even the Captain seems slightly uncomfortable with what he sees. Not enough to do anything other than his duty, but you know, he looks sad a couple of times. That counts for something.

All the daytime scenes are washed out or colored dully. The sky's always cloudy or shrouded in fog. it makes everything look cold, or maybe dreamlike. Like this is a nightmare world these people are drifting through, just suffering all around. People dying slowly.

Unfortunately, the washed out color scheme means the white subtitles they use whenever Fenney or the Irish speak in Gaelic are really fucking difficult to read. I wasn't planning to need to read when I turned this film, and that added complication was an especially unpleasant surprise.