Be Good Or Be Gone

"Prisoner 1701, Prisoner 1864, your request for temporary release has been granted. You have 4 days leave. Now lads...be good. "

They will yeah.

Be Good Or Be Gone is a disagreeable watch that while clocking in at just over 90 minutes feels far longer. There will be comparisons made to Lenny Abrahamson's 2004 drama Adam And Paul but this film isn't a patch on that one, it's doesn't have a sliver of it's soul and at no point in that 17 year old movie does one of it's leads call a woman a cunt before headbutting her. It's a moment, less than a third of the way in that will alienate the vast majority of the audience.

Cousins Ste (Les Martin, who also wrote this) and Weed (Declan Mills) are free. For 4 days anyway. A furlough from Mountjoy is theirs and they want to make the most of it. Weed is addicted to heroin and he's suffering already because it's easier to fix on the inside than out. Ste has other things on his mind, namely his daughter and his girlfriend Dee (Jenny Lee Masterson). Previous endeavours and the tragic events wrought by them have burned his bridges in the community and in the little free time he has he wants to at least try to start a rebuild. It's easier said than done though when the past is waiting for you around every corner.

You'll rarely see a film as tonally messy as this one. Is it a comedy, is it a thriller, is it a gritty urban drama? I don't think it knows itself and so tosses everything in the pot and the end result isn't a tasty one. People get bopped on the head comically with woks, dealers feel like otherworldly beings prone to profundity, others are mad into fashion in a way that surprises everyone they meet, someone else is violently sexually assaulted and carved up with a stanley knife in a brutally jarring moment. Your head will spin watching it and not in a good way. People we're supposed to warm to are wildly unpleasant creations and when you see some of the things they get up to you won't give a damn if they make it to the end credits or not. It makes for a hard film to get behind.

Even the way the main characters interact with each other feels off. Ste and Weed are related but the film never gives us a sense of any connection or chemistry between them. Dee's reactions to Steve never once feel natural, changing from scene to scene and the end of their story feels hugely unearned. As a result we get a boggy middle section that nearly kills the film in it's tracks. It's only a cameo from Graham Earley (of Broken Law and Carbdboard Gangsters) that gives the film any bit of energy at all and even then his part in the film goes from farce to violence with head spinning speed. The film chafes even more when you realise it's disparate parts aren't bad at all. Cathal Nally making his feature film debut, captures his vision in a low key, naturalistic way while Les Martin and Declan Mills put in fine, believable performances. It's just a pity none of it gels.

Be Good Or Be Gone is available to rent on google movies now. It's not a film I can recommend.