Saipan review: The Roy Keane film had its world premiere. Here's our verdict...
Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthy and Éanna Hardwicke as Roy Keane in Saipan.
★★★☆☆
It’s one of the most famous speeches by an Irish person in the 21st century, and now Roy Keane’s expletive-strewn rant at Mick McCarthy on the eve of the 2002 World Cup has been immortalised on film in
“I don't rate you as a manager, and I don't rate you as a person. You can stick your World Cup up your arse,” fumes Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke’s Keane at Steve Coogan’s speechless McCarthy. Hardwicke’s veins pop and his eyes bulge: it’s the biggest on-screen explosion involving a Cork person since Cillian Murphy invented the atomic bomb in
In truth, Hardwicke’s good work isn’t quite enough to paper over the cracks of the engaging, but flawed – wife-and-husband film-making duo Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s dramatisation of the falling out between Keane and Ireland manager Mick McCarthy 23 years ago.
which has had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday night, with release details expected to be announced soon, tries to be fair to both Keane and McCarthy.
Hardwicke plays Keane as an angry Duracell Bunny. He trains in a cold rage, is forever finding fault with others. He is a man unable to relax, whose will to win has spiralled into emotional self-harm.
Coogan’s McCarthy, meanwhile, is a decent sort trying to do his best, yet lacks the backbone to confront the culture of performative buffoonery that had taken root in Irish soccer before the World Cup. He is chuffed to have brought Ireland so far.
Unlike Keane, he doesn’t believe they can win the World Cup or that they have any right to presume they can go far in the tournament.
has a flinty energy – especially when Hardwicke is on screen – but the movie is ultimately too workmanlike to do justice to the story. Paul Fraser’s script smartly identifies the tension around Irish identity between Cork-born Keane and Barnsley-native McCarthy — and the Mayfield man's assertion that Mick “isn’t a real Irish person” (like Mick, Coogan is second-generation Irish).
The film also touches on Keane’s disdain for Irish people who lean into the stereotype of the happy drunk.
Yet, having raised these issues, it doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. The film blunders forward in a haze of cliched montages and a somewhat random soundtrack (The Stone Roses, Miss Kitten and the Hacker, Fontaines DC).
To its credit, the film does capture the complexities of Keane, the eternally-tortured soul bossing the centre circle. The story opens in Cork in the 1970s, where a young Roy kicks a ball against the wall. Fast forward two and a bit decades, and Ireland’s most driven and gifted midfielder is about to lead the team in the Japan and Korea World Cup.
As we know from history, the wheels came off when Keane took issue with the shoddy training facilities arranged by the FAI (personified by Jamie Beamish as a sweaty glad-handler in a cheap suit). Isolated from his team-mates, Roy is tricked into giving a damning interview about McCarthy’s management by a fictional reporter (Aoife Hinds).
Hardwicke makes for a convincing Keane and Coogan puts in one of his better performances to the extent that you aren’t constantly thinking of Alan Partridge. But the film feels small – it largely consists of interior shots - when the saga of Roy v Mick was so huge. is thumpingly adequate, but doesn’t quite hit the target.
