Liam Neeson Embraces Cowboy Spirit in ‘In the Land of Saints and Sinners'”

Kerry Condon plays a potty-mouthed IRA gang leader and Neeson is the quiet antihero in this action thriller set at the height of the Troubles

Producer-director and veteran Clint Eastwood collaborator Robert Lorenz is now saddling up for this “Donegal western”. It is an action thriller that finds the cowboy spirit in the lush rolling grasslands of County Donegal in Ireland’s north-west, neighbouring Northern Ireland but geographically sequestered from the rest of the Republic.

In 1974, at the height of the Troubles, an IRA gang led by icy-hearted and potty-mouthed Doireann (Kerry Condon) accidentally kills a bunch of kids with a Belfast bomb blast.

Without especially regretting the collateral damage, she leads her crew as they escape over the border into Donegal to lie low, fetching up on the outskirts of a village that appears populated by adorable stereotypes.

These include a stolid Garda officer (Ciarán Hinds), and his best mate, widower Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson), a quiet man who apparently makes a living dealing in secondhand books – and shyly courting neighbour Rita (Niamh Cusack).

Actually, Finbar’s trade is whacking people for local mobster McQue (an amusing performance from Colm Meaney), but he feels a little bit bad about it all these days and we are invited to differentiate between his work topping bad guys who had it coming and the awful doings of the IRA.

Jack Gleeson (best known as Joffrey from TV’s Game of Thrones) tackles with relish the role of Finbar’s annoying younger colleague Kevin, a gunman and Moody Blues enthusiast who also wants out of the assassination business and yearns for the promised land of California where he will play guitar in a band.

There’s bits and pieces of entertaining stuff here, a few sharp lines and a gonzo final shootout, but the overall tone of cliche is a bit wearing, correctly signalled in the title, which appears to misremember the phrase “saints and scholars”.

There is also something ungallant in the way the plot provides for Cusack’s character to vanish from the story after being punched in the face, and then forgotten about until almost the very end.

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