Donnybrook, 2018.
Directed by Tim Sutton.
Starring Jamie Bell, Margaret Qualley, Frank Grillo, Chris Browning, James Badge Dale, and Pat Healy.
SYNOPSIS:
An ex-marine desperate to provide for his young family is driven through lack of options towards the Donnybrook, an illicit backwards bare-knuckle cage fight with a prize of $100,000.
Exploring a dark underworld of America and the ‘forgotten’ communities that reside in it, Donnybrook is a tense and uncomfortable feature from Tim Sutton. Adapting a crime novel by Frank Bill, Sutton attempts to give voice to the motivations and stark horror of lives without direction and very little choices.
Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) is an ex-marine returning home struggling to provide for his partner and two young children. Drawn to the prospect of crime, and to the backwoods world of bare-knuckle fighting, Earl is portrayed as an honest man trying to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.
The opposite side to Earl is Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), an out of control drug-dealer who leaves a trail of death and destruction wherever he goes. Angus tries to control everything in his field of vision, including sister Delia (Margaret Qualley), a haunted woman desperate to get out of the incestuous world of abuse and criminal activity that she was born into. All three of the characters make their way to the Donnybrook; an illegal cage match where the last fighter standing wins $100,000.
The fight plays out at the climax of the film, and Sutton does a reasonable job at building up the audience expectation for it, although it is not completely clear in the first third of the film what the Donnybrook actually is. This may have something to do with the thick Kentucky/Ohio accents most of the characters employ – Bell’s accent is more than credible too – but actually it is more to do with the wistful dreamlike approach of slower dialogue driven scenes.
Movements of characters on a raft floating along on water in the dark night have a fairy-tale quality about them, which strengthens the myth-like aspects of the story. Earl is good, and Angus is evil and there’s never any doubt about it. There is little nuance in the story, and we learn nothing of how Angus got to be so messed-up. Drugs and poverty we assume, but the film doesn’t seem too bothered about the details of why the characters are playing this out, simply that they are. Decent performances all round can’t disguise the fact that these are basically stock characters treading the boards in pulpy melodramatic fashion.
Taken as a rumination of economic-troubles and poor white (all of the characters are white) communities in the USA, Donnybrook delivers a punch in the guts all right, but it’s one delivered without subtlety or deftness. It makes the statement that there are people who have to fight to survive, and they either do or don’t. As a more action driven martial arts film that would have been one thing, but Donnybrook plays more as an uneasy mix of noir crime and social problem movie. There’s plenty of sickening violence and shock factor tactics, but ultimately, this only diminishes the overall resonance of the film.
Donnybrook opens in select US cinemas on February 15th, and is on-demand from February 21st.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert W Monk is a freelance journalist and film writer.
