John Boorman's underworld drama in old-style black-and-white (Seamus Deasy, cinematographer), mustering a wide range of grays on a wide screen, with subtle gradations and occasional spots of harsh glare on the polished surface. The title figure is the real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (we learn to say it CAH-hill, not CAY-hill), who, after a long stretch of carrying the flag of the generic Irish Rebel, running the authorities in circles, and capturing the popular imagination, was gunned down by the IRA in 1994. This is the point where the movie starts. (An intimation of police collusion is tossed out, but there is no Oliver Stone to pick it up and go with it.) The details of his career in flashback, the daring heists, the clever ruses, the narrow escapes, are interesting enough as straight information (e.g., the use of pigeon cages to smuggle gold bullion across to England, with the birds set free to fly home on the far side), but it would not have been anything special in color. The episodic, anecdotal storytelling lacks pace and drive, and the portrait of the man tends to get lost in admiration. Writer-director Boorman — whose own home, and in particular the gold record he received for the "Dueling Banjos" number in Deliverance, was targeted by Cahill, an event commemorated in a spooky sequence of the burglar gliding through an occupied house at night with a coal miner's lamp on his forehead — has boasted of his frankness and unflinchingness in showing Cahill's brutal side, but that's just so much fence-straddling and bet-hedging. Brendan Gleeson, with his bright beady eyes in a blobby doughy shapeless head, dispenses a steady and unhurried performance, gets great mileage out of the novel mannerism (no doubt true to life) of hiding his face behind his hand even in intimate conversation, and gets no share of the blame for glamorization. With Adrian Dunbar, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball, Jon Voight. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd