Black '47

  Irish soldier Martin Feeney (James Frecheville) returns to his native Connemara from a long foreign stint with the British military to find his land in shambles. It's 1847, the great hunger has been ravaging the land for two years, and the English landowners have been using the widespread poverty as an excuse to evict famers from their holdings, causing deaths from exposure to skyrocket as the malnourished, bankrupt peasants are turned loose on the countryside.

 His mother and brother dead (she died of starvation, refusing to take the Anglican church's charity as it came on condition of conversion; His brother was hanged after stabbing a constable when their house was taken), Feeney aims to take his brother's remaining family and join the hordes of Irish folk fleeing to America.

 Unfortunately, he never gets the chance: One bright winter morning the local constabulary arrive with an order to tear the roof from his brother's house and evict everyone inside. Martin is held down when he tries to intervene, and can only watch as someone is shot while resisting and the women are turned out into the frozen wilds barefoot.

 When he returns from the constabulary the next day he finds his sister in law and her daughter frozen to death in the now roofless house.

 Pretty good basis for a revenge movie, right? Black '47 is a well-researched, very angry revenge fantasy that's not just about the particulars of its story, but the whole sad chapter in Irish and British history. An angry pointed finger at what some historians consider a deliberate attempt at genocide, courtesy of some long-dead people who still have statues up in parks and streets around London. Fun!

 And yeah, it almost is fun, because as it turns out Feeney has a particular set of skills, which he demonstrated amply the day he was taken to the constabulary in a pretty cool action scene. Killing, I mean. He's good at killing, which he does frequently during the movie, and with a grim sense of poetic justice.

 But that bit in the constabulary is the only properly exciting action sequence in the movie, because I guess the movie is sadly not insane enough to go all Django Unchained with the great famine. Oh well, at least it knows to go out with another big action setpiece.
 Instead of being all about angry Irish Rambo against the dastardly English, Black '47 focuses on a small army task force that gets sent to stop Feeney by any means. It's led by a young, pompous little shit (Freddie Fox), with constable Hannah (Hugo Weaving) as their tracker and a young private (Barry Keoghan) to tend to their horses. Hannah is very much the Col. Trautman figure, an old army buddy of Feeney's who provides running commentary on how the British picked the wrong man to push.

 So we mainly follow these three - soon to be four, with the welcome addition of a local guide played by the always soulful Stephen Rea - as they follow Feeney on his rampage, always two steps behind. It's an engaging tale, though there's quite a bit of on-the-nose exposition as the movie makes time so that the British villains can vent their loathsome practices vis à vis the famine situation. Jim Broadbent's Lord Kilmichael is all in for genocide, for example, happily comparing his work with the wiping out of the Indian nations in the US.
 Most of these stances are certainly well documented, but as asides in a genre movie they're a little too didactic. I'd probably appreciate them more if I didn't know about the points they're making already, though. Not to mention that the two-dimensional villains do make the film's premise, which is basically a slasher movie where an unstoppable murdering machine works his way up systemic injustice, much easier to swallow.

 Its desire to illustrate the ills of the time include a completely unnecessary aside into how the English were still exporting food during the famine. Again, true, and again, a bit preachy. The approach does have some problems, but its heart is int the right place and by making the oppressors into such clear bad guys it tilts the movie further into action territory, so it didn't actually bother that much.

 While it tries hard to remain on the period drama side of things, I'm comfortable calling it an action movie based on the amount of shootouts, chases and that pretty cool fight at the constabulary, and the opposition being such an unrepentant, openly evil (to our eyes) cast of villains*. Or maybe a pseudo-Western.

 The script (by P.J. Dillon, Pierce Ryan and Eugene O'Brien) has some pretty big superficial similarities to First Blood, but they remain skin deep - The Rambo here is not really a character, just a hook on which to hang a gritty revenge yarn festooned with history lessons.

 There's quite a few heavy hitters in the cast, and they all acquit themselves nicely, with (unsurprisingly) Weaving and Rea standing out. Frecheville is fine, but his character is only ever required to be stoic and convincingly badass, which he does handily.

 Director Lance Daly directs the action with some flair, and Declan Quinn's cinematography is beautiful - wintry and as drained of color as the story is drained of nuance, all miserable Irish landscapes with abandoned thatchless cottages. He also likes to shoot darkened interiors with natural light seeping in, some of the scenes resembling a sort of dutch chiaroscuro. Plenty of striking imagery here.

*: someone smarter than me would write a joke here about how the word villain comes from villeins, which are similar to the victims of this movie's villains.