Actors (Sell Through) DVD Reviews

I was given a copy of this film but didn’t bother to watch it for ages as I’d never heard of it and it wasn’t tempted by the blurb. I then saw a trailer for it and it looked like it might be better than I first thought so I decided to give it a go.

‘The Actors’ is produced by acclaimed filmmaker Neil Jordan (‘The Crying Game’). Jordan wrote the original story for this comedy that is directed by Conor McPherson.

The plot concerns two struggling, actors, O'Malley (Caine) and Tom (Dylan Moran) who are fed up of scraping a living doing plays which no one ever wants to see. Caine's character O'Malley is about to play Richard III, and decides to research playing a crook by hanging out with some small time gangsters at the local pub.

But once he starts hanging out with the wrong people he soon finds that he has been drawn into a large-scale heist with his colleague Tom and Tom’s 9 year old niece, Mary [played by Abigail Nersen]. They have to use all of there acting talents to get them out of a very complicated mess!

Although this is basically an Irish film - with an Irish producer, co-stars (Moran and Sir Michael Gambon) and additional funding from the Irish Film Board - the cast is partially English, including the talents of Miranda Richardson.

I really didn’t think that there was anything special about this film at all. The performances are fine [although there could have been a little more background to Caine’s character, I found that I really didn’t care what happened to him at all!], and there are some funny moments [most of which are thanks to the scenes between Moran and Nersen] but nothing that really stands out. The storyline starts off quite clever but it gets quite strange in the middle when it makes an attempt at black comedy which doesn’t quite work.

I really won’t recommend buying or renting this film. It might be worth a watch when it comes on TV but I would be disappointed if I’d paid to see it.