Review of '71 (2014) by Moviemastereddy — 05 Apr 2016

In “ ’71,” an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye. The soldier is played by Jack O’Connell, last seen being brutalized (in more ways than one) in “Unbroken,” the Angelina Jolie biopic about Louis Zamperini. That movie proved a bad fit for Mr. O’Connell, who never put down roots in the character, an Olympian turned World War II captive, because Ms. Jolie couldn’t or wouldn’t let him. By contrast, Mr. O’Connell runs away with “ ’71,” in which his character’s every emotional, psychological and physical hurdle makes for kinetic cinema.

I mean run literally. The movie is set against the sectarian violence in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a year that opened with the tarring and feathering of several men by the Irish Republican Army. By February, a British soldier was dead as were a number of civilians, and several riots had convulsed Belfast. It’s against this backdrop that Mr. O’Connell’s character, Gary Hook, arrives with a regiment of similarly inexperienced soldiers. Smoke pours from burning cars, some strategically bookending streets like barricades. During the day, children play among scattered bricks that they sometimes hurl at the soldiers (when they’re not lobbing bags of feces instead). At night, the mazelike streets belong to the war and the running people, British and Irish, stoking the flames.

When you meet Gary, he’s a wide-eyed recruit on the receiving end of another man’s fists. He doesn’t talk much. The movie, written by the playwright Gregory Burke, favors narrative devices like foreshadowing and doubling over the usual blabbity blab, an approach that dovetails with Mr. Demange’s talent for elegantly deployed action. The blood that pours from Gary’s face bluntly sets the scene but also foreshadows the river of red to come. Similarly, the obstacle course that Gary and his fellow soldiers soon run, leaping and going belly down in the muck, forecasts the more punishing hurdles to come. Meanwhile, a short, elliptical sequence of Gary and his young brother, Darren (Harry Verity), adds some personal detail even as it presages the later appearance of a second boy.

That may sound too schematic, but Mr. Demange moves so effortlessly and rapidly from these introductory interludes that you may not notice all the parts shifting into gear. He knows when to linger in the moment, too, as when Gary watches Darren at a home for children, a place that, you intuit, the older brother knows inch by loveless inch.

You never learn why or how the brothers came to this sterile holding pen. As the story unfolds, though, you wonder if being parentless explains the seriousness of Gary’s gaze and his mournfulness. His immaturity and the military may explain his reserve, but it’s also a good guess that his survival instincts were honed in that home.

Men and women have been sprinting across screens since Eadweard Muybridge turned his cameras on them in the late 19th century. The silent clowns ran as does Jason Bourne, and, at times, it seems as if the movies were made for ready, set, go, go, go: Buster Keaton bolting in “Seven Chances”; Cary Grant fleeing in “North by Northwest”; Franka Potente racing in “Run Lola Run.” Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with “ ’71,” but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy. One minute, Gary is ripping down an alley with the camera jostling after him, as if desperate to keep up; the next, he’s careering down a street, the camera now steadily gliding alongside him.

Much of the movie takes place in a single night, which certainly worked for James Joyce in “Ulysses.” Whether or not the filmmakers self-consciously borrowed from that book’s chapter set during one hallucinatory Dublin evening, Gary’s journey into this other night-town is similarly a voyage into the self. In between sprints — he’s soon fleeing a breakaway faction of the I.R.A., led by an eager killer, Quinn (Killian Scott) — he meets several souls who help him out, sometimes a bit too conveniently, including a father and daughter, Eamon (Richard Dormer) and Brigid (Charlie Murphy). What Gary doesn’t know is that the biggest threat may come in the form of an undercover British unit led by a twitchy captain, Browning (a ferocious Sean Harris). The enemy of Gary’s enemy is closing in.