Séamas O'Reilly: 'Blackbird' is bad in every way it is possible for a film to be bad
Michael Flatley at the Irish Premiere screening of his film 'Blackbird at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin. Picture: Brian McEvoy
The problem with a term like “vanity project” is that it presupposes there is any other form of art. Making a film, or a song, a book, is a staggeringly presumptuous act, in a world so filled with them already.
Take books. I released one of those last year, like a massive, vain child. A 2010 survey suggested 75% of Irish people read six books a year. Extrapolated over 50 years of prime reading age, this amounts to 600 books across a lifetime for the most readerly among us.
Even if you increased that rate to one book a week, and granted yourself a maximally long and healthy 70 years in which to read to your heart’s content, you’d hit a tally of about 3,600 books. That’s less than 0.07% of the 6m volumes available in Trinity College’s copyright library.
Put another way, if you were to read one book a week for 70 years, you’d only get through a quarter of the books that Amazon currently stocks about Hitler, and less than a 10th it offers on losing weight. (Intriguingly, those two searches do have a crossover and, at the above rate, you could spend three months of your life just reading books about Hitler’s diet alone.)
Put in this context, introducing another book, or poem, or painting, or movie to this teetering totem pole of media is not merely vain, but insane. But then, along comes a vanity project that reminds you why the term exists in the first place — I speak, of course, of , une film de Michael Flatley.
First announced in 2018, is a spy-thriller written, directed, produced by and starring Michael Flatley.
Its plot, such as one exists, is that Victor Blackley (Flatley) used to be a spy for MI6, in a clandestine group called The Chieftains, which appears to be made up of three portly men in their 60s and two women in their early 30s. Having retired following his wife’s death, all four surviving Chieftains now live in Barbados working in Blackley’s resort-cum-casino, where an evil arms dealer played by Eric Roberts is coming to sell a diabolical superweapon to a scary terrorist, accompanied by his fiancée, a woman from Blackley’s own past.
I don’t think it can be overstated how long, and how earnestly, I’ve awaited this film since it was announced, then unannounced, and then memory holed, shortly after.
And then, just over a month ago, Flatley announced that he or, at least, the world was ready for it to be unleashed, and last Friday, at a raucous showing in the Light House cinema in Smithfield, I finally got to see fly.
There have been many reviews over the past week, many of which have focused on how bad the film is, how terrible its acting, how shoddy its script, and bewildering its conception (all true). The temptation is to carve out some other niche for myself, to contrive some positive viewpoint, however flimsy, that marks my take as different and unique — to tell you that it’s not that bad, and is actually an artfully pitched study on masculinity or post-colonialism, and then explain why.
That will not be possible. This film is bad in every way it is possible for a film to be bad. Listing all of its bad qualities would, effectively, list all of its qualities.
The acting, particularly from Flatley, is remarkably terrible, and made worse by his insistence on sporting a different, Dutch-angled hat in nearly every scene.
The script is basically made up of half-remembered lines from films that do make sense, and the plot is garbled to the point of incomprehensibility. Its characterisation of female characters is appalling, but then so is its treatment of all humans, all of whom appear to lack sentience. Yes, in a rare feat, not only fails the Bechdel Test but the Turing Test as well.
Why does an Irish-themed brigade of MI6 agents named The Chieftains exist? Why does he spend several outlandish flashback sequences of this film traipsing through a jungle wearing motorcycle gear, like some sort of covert ops Fonzie? Why did these spies all decide they wanted to spend their retirement — and in their young female colleague Caz’s case, her 30s — working hospitality roles at a casino resort?
One of them, Matiti, appears to have been a spy on the same level as the rest of them and is now working as a bellhop. Even if they wanted this insane demotion, are those skills particularly transferrable?
This is not the worst movie ever made, as anyone who has spent any time at the burning coalface of straight-to-video schlock will tell you.
Hell, if I had $100,000 for every time I’d seen Eric Roberts in a worse movie than this, I’d have roughly the same amount of money as Eric Roberts got for doing them. (His IMdB page currently lists nearly 200 projects slated as either in production or prepared for release in 2022).
No, what’s baffling, and almost ecstatically embarrassing, is that one can see the maker’s mark, the thumbprint left on the clay by a man who wanted this film to be made. The writer-director-producer-star who wrote all these lines, and then said them while squinting, looking for all the world like a cross between Terry Venables and the Tayto Man.
To see him interviewed on the as if he had made a normal film that any other human might have made was weird.
I suppose it would have been strange if Ryan Tubridy had spent 20 minutes just asking: “Why?”. But choosing to ignore it entirely was a bit like having on a man from Ardee who’d made a giant portrait of Anne Doyle’s face in his own blood, and politely asking him how he got the shading so right on her nose.
isn’t so bad it’s good. It is, at best, so bad it’s unbelievable, and many more people will probably, like me, watch it for just that reason. It would be hypocritical of me to tell you not to, but let’s just say you’d be better off reading about Hitler’s diet.
