Film REVIEW Route Irish

Ken Loach’s filmography has seen decent-hearted working-class types, among other fates, left homeless, have their children taken away, descend into prostitution/crime/alcoholism/drug addiction, bullied, beaten, have their pets murdered and hang themselves. To this cheery list we may now add: get blown to bits in Iraq. Such is the lot of Frankie (John Bishop), a former soldier turned security contractor. Frankie’s gruesome demise has left his bezzie mate (they’re from Liverpool) and colleague Fergus (Mark Womack) traumatized, mainly because it was at his urging that Frankie decided to sign up for the gig. Although the GBP 10,000 a month probably helped oil the wheels.

A mystery mobile phone, smuggled out of Iraq by Frankie before he was killed, leads Fergus to suspect that his friend’s death – on Route Irish, the dangerous road between Bagdad airport and the Green Zone – might not be as straightforward as it seems. He and Frankie’s widow, Rachel (Andrea Lowe), set about investigating the potential cover-up, while at the same time dealing with their grief.

The film is set largely in Liverpool, though flashbacks from Iraq (filmed in Jordan) powerfully evoke the daily horror of war, in particular its impact on the ordinary citizens trying to go about their business in the conflict zone. The political point is manifest: Loach’s outrage at the impunity with which private contractors – often violent ex-squaddies – can take out their bloodlust on the local population while their callous, golf-playing corporate superiors pocket the profits of the reconstruction deals. Alongside its moral message, Route Irish unfolds as a conspiracy theory tale, in which – needless to say; after all, it is Loach – the baddie is the movie’s only posh person.

Though at the beginning the director seems to be dividing his characters rather too neatly into good and bad, as events progress and move the film towards the revenge genre, the ethical picture gets less black and white. There are some very sincere performances, largely from unknown or non-professional actors, and Loach, as ever, makes some important social points.
But something stops Route Irish from being entirely successful and earning a place among the director’s seminal works. Towards the end the plot loses some of the plausibility and realism for which Loach is noted, and flirts with melodrama. While elements of the narrative should tick the thriller box, they sometimes fall short, and there is an occasional unpolished quality that makes the production feel more like a TV drama than a movie.

But despite this, Route Irish in an intelligent film – like all of Loach’s output it is earnest, serious and with heart – with shades of The Constant Gardener and Syriana, albeit not with their scale. The moral murkiness of the denouement and Loach’s refusal to tie things up neatly befit the world of war and profiteering the film examines.