In the Land of Saints and Sinners

Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) He lives in a quiet Irish village, working as an assassin and shooting at tin cans in the company of a local officer (Ciaran Hinds). It's a bloody 1974, the civil war in Northern Ireland is taking lives. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) is fighting for the reunification of Northern Ireland from Great Britain, and therefore does not shun the methods of terror. Violence breaks into the small village as well – Finbar learns that the locals are being intimidated by the Doirann gang. The mercenary will have to defend the right to a quiet life and expel the reptiles from the republican group.

Cinema is in no hurry to see off the old guard of action heroes. If we say goodbye, then in the intricate manner of the Scorpions band, which has been feeding fans with "farewell tours" for 10 years – and still won't leave the stage. Combat retirees like The Expendables and 71-year-old Liam Neeson are touring with the same rock and roll energy. The second one, I must say, made a name for himself at the time of the first wrinkles and gray hairs, running around the streets with a gun in search of his missing daughter. "The Last Mercenary" (in the original, the much more lyrical "In the Land of Saints and Sinners") brings Neeson's list of fighters to the size of a teletype tape. The Brit once again plays a lone wolf, a stoic with a traumatic past who has gone through the crucible of wars. Fate is a fool, but there is no bullet: instead of a family, the hero has only his favorite gun, which starts the mechanism of a primitive plot in a completely Chekhov-like way.

The action movie by Robert Lorenz, a director who has worked with Neeson for a long time (before that there was a nondescript "Intercessor"), is coming straight from the trumps. The viewer is given a lively texture of Ireland, with landscapes of natural beauty nailing to the screen – one involuntarily begins to look for traces of Martin McDonagh ("Banshee Inisherin") and Ken Loach ("The Wind that Shakes the Heather"), who have already talked about the heavy share of the Irish land. True, Lorenz quickly shakes us off – tragedy is tragedy, but the audience still came for action, so the story of the Irish conflict, where religious and territorial tensions overlapped, fades into the background. What kind of terror is there, what does the confrontation between Catholics from the IRA and Protestants have to do with it, he is not so interested, but a banal vendetta is. Only Neeson, who is no longer charged with slaughter, is taking revenge, but marginal terrorists led by the demonic heroine Kerry Condon.

Until the heroes come together in the expected battle, the viewer has time to appreciate the beauty of Ireland. Emerald hills and monumental cliffs in the full width of the frame, red-haired handsome men, devoted to the football element and red ale, live among this desolate timelessness. "Meet me in the pub" – the antagonist sets up a meeting for the hero, choosing not a deserted wilderness, but a noisy epicenter of Irish life. Which is very significant, by the way – it turned out to be such a "very Irish movie", except with the final shootout, clearly spied from an American western. The polyphony of cultures does not end there: for added importance, in a conversation with a local officer, the mercenary of Neeson shares his impressions of Dostoevsky. The hero was once accustomed to good literature by his wife. It remains to wonder how many bookworms have bred in action movies – isn't that what we've already seen in the first "Great Equalizer"? The plot, for all its "besh" simplicity, also takes overclocking from an image created quite according to Dostoevsky – from a tear on the cheek of an innocent child. And then there is the logic of westerns and thrillers, which can no longer be helped by any philosophical support in the form of Dostoevsky