I really wanted to like Bring Them Down, an Irish drama featuring a number of actors that I have liked in many other movies. Sadly, it feels like many other films I've seen over the past few years, although it's not as good as any of them. It's particularly irritating to see such a great cast being slightly wasted in something that could have been much better.
Christopher Abbott plays Michael, a young farmer who is trying his best to keep the family business afloat while being overlooked by his father, Ray (Colm Meaney). Times are tough, so tough that a nearby farming family becomes a bitter enemy when young Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals a couple of animals and claims that they died. That lie is revealed when Michael sees the animals displayed at a market, which leads to a confrontation between himself and Jack's father, Gary (Paul Ready). Things start to get worse from there.
Co-written by Christopher Andrews and Jonathan Hourigan, with Andrews also making his debut as a feature director after getting a few shorts under his belt, it's hard to really pin down how this fails. I think it's just too many moments that we've seen before without enough added to the material to make it seem really fresh or worth our time. This is a patchwork movie, and some of those patches are almost identical to other films that you could either revisit or watch for the first time.
Abbott does okay in the lead role, even if he suffers in comparison to almost everyone else onscreen. This is definitely time for people to try to make him a thing, but I'm not sure he's truly deserving of the push. Keoghan, on the other hand, deserves all of the positive attention and praise he's been getting over the past few years, and he delivers yet another effortlessly mesmerising turn here. Meaney is fantastic, Ready is very good indeed, and a couple of excellent supporting turns come from Aaron Heffernan and Nora-Jane Noone.
There's a lot being mixed in to a big melting pot here (family pressure, problems handed down through generations, the difficulties of making ends meet in a vocation where profit margins can depend on one good animal), but none of it is able to come through clear enough. To overuse the analogy, a lot of the flavours overwhelm one another, and you're just left with a load of bland mush. Even the non-chronological presentation of events, we get shown things and then taken back to see them from another perspective, doesn't really add the impact and tension that it should.
If you want some great Irish-set movies then I can give you a good half dozen or so. If you want films set against the harsh life of farming then I can probably recommend a few of those too. Great Barry Keoghan films? Easily done. Better roles for Colm Meaney? Just as easy. There may not be anything here that's awful, but it's shocking that so much of it feels so disappointingly average.
5/10
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