Rating: D
Dir: Michael Flatley
Star: Michael Flatley, Eric Roberts, Nicole Evans, Ian Beattie
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Flatley’s fondness for self-aggrandizement. As long ago as 1998, I wrote about Flatley’s split from Riverdance, instead launching his own show, Lord of the Dance, in which he basically played Jesus Christ. Klaus Kinski could probably have given him a few hints, as to why that might not be a good idea. Flatley and I then parted ways: I didn’t think much about him over the next couple of decades, and I imagine he reciprocated. But in 2018, Michael re-entered my sphere when he decided to enter the world of cinema. Naturally, he decided to write, finance, produce, direct and star in a narrative feature film – despite precisely zero previous experience in any of those elements.
What happened to the film after completion of filming in March 2018 is telling. A cast and crew screening took place quickly enough, just a couple of months later in June. However, it was then more than four years after that, before any public screening for the film happened, the film finally getting released in September 2022. The reviews were scathing: “Lord of the Awful 007 Rip-off” is one of the kinder lines. “By far the best performance in the film is by Flatley’s seemingly endless collection of hats,” said Empire. The film has since all but vanished again. Here in the US, it never received a physical release, and has remained completely unavailable on any official streaming service – this, in a world where all six entries in the Death Toilet franchise are available at the click of a button.
Of course, somebody uploaded it to YouTube.
It’s often described as Ireland’s equivalent to The Room, and in all honesty, that’s not a bad way to describe it. Like that, there must have been a fair amount of money put into it. This is not some poverty-row nonsense like The Creeping Terror. Even though Roberts has now become synonymous with “Don’t send me the script, just send me the cheque”, this was when his presence still had genuine marquee value, and a price. Patrick Bergin, too, is a genuine name as the spy boss. This also filmed in London and Barbados, in addition to Flatley’s country estate in Cork. That kind of shit is not cheap. But it’s not a vanity project. Dear me, no. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “It would have just taken too long to raise the money, and I didn’t know what I’d be doing next year.”
Sure. Why bother to wait until you can devote the appropriate amount of time to a major project like this, when you can just bang out a globe-trotting feature? It begins with a funeral in the pouring rain, which seems appropriate since the project basically killed off Flatley’s movie career [He announced that pre-production work was already under way on his second film, Dreamdance, in October 2018, but absolutely nothing has been heard about it since] Who is being buried? Fucked if we know. Maybe the woman seen in a flashback? Maybe not. “You did what you had to do,” Victor Blackley (Flatley) is told by his former colleague in a shadowy Irish group called the Chieftains. Not to be confused with the Irish folk group called The Chieftains, presumably.
He’s basically James Bond. If James Bond was aged 60 – older than any Bond actor in any Bond film – and possessed an irreparably damaged spine, a balky left knee, two ruptured Achilles tendons, and a recurring broken bone in his foot. Which is why there have been many more active Bond girls than Victor Blackley. But he is still spoken about in hushed whispers in intelligence circles, despite doing absolutely nothing to justify such a reputation, and irresistibly attractive to any woman. I repeat: not a vanity project at all, dear me, no. But what’s the plot? Something about a missing formula being sold on the black market. There’s arms dealer Blake Molineux (Roberts), engaged to Blackley’s old flame, Vivian (Evans). You just know he’s going to have to come out of retirement from his Caribbean nightclub and…
That’s part of the problem. Blackley – I just wrote Flatley by accident, and may well do so again – doesn’t do very much, beyond sporting one or other of those hats (top), at a jaunty angle that operates in lieu of any actual personality. The script rarely gets beyond the clichéd, particularly in the dialogue which contains such well-worn lines as: “She wasn’t overly keen on being recognized, if you catch my drift,” “That big guy’s got trouble written all over him,” and “You can tell much about a man by the company he keeps.” Oh, these are all said by the same character, within a thirty-second spell. He’s not along in this department. “Aren’t you going to say something?” says Vivian after they dance silently cheek-to-cheek. “I just did,” replies Blackley. What? I’d have said three minutes of vigorous Irish set dancing might have been clearer.
Not helping matters: we’re close to an hour through the 88-minute running-time before Victor has agonized sufficiently that he does come out of retirement, to stop the bad guys from… whatever. “You can’t go on living without love,” says Vivian, in more dialogue written by spinning the Wheel O’ Clichés. Evans may actually be a worse actor than Flatley, capable of taking side-splitting lines like “I always loved you, and you know that. And you know you loved me too”, and robbing them of every vestige of their comedic potential. Wait, it wasn’t supposed to be funny? Ah, my mistake. Anyway, she steals the SIM card containing the formula from Molineux and gives it to Blackley.
Somehow, this leads to a poker game between the two men which is both a shameless rip-off of Casino Royale, and even duller than that card game. “The stakes are far higher than you can afford,” snarls Molineux. “I’ll take my chances,” replies Blackley, though it’s hard to hear their lines over the Wheel O’ Clichés going BRRRRRRRR. We then get the closest this has to an actual action scene, with Blackley getting into a fist-fight with one of Molineux’s minions. This lasts less than twelve seconds from the first punch being thrown, to the henchman lying unconscious on the floor, having failed to land a single blow. We eventually get a flashback which might explain Victor’s angst, but is mostly an excuse for Flatley to put into practice the skills learned in his acting correspondence course. “Lesson #3: Pulling anguished faces.”
It all ends in a gunfight which, amazingly, lasts even less time than the fist-fight: a staggering five seconds before the film cuts away. It’s preceded by Flatley as Blackley saying, “Shall we dance?” – about as close as this comes to a moment of self-awareness. I will say, it very much looks like a proper movie. Whatever the flaws, the cinematographer – who, in a rare decision to leave that shit to the experts, is not Michael Flatley, but someone with actual experience in Luke Palmer – did his job and did it well. This very much looks like a proper movie. Indeed, when Flatley isn’t on screen, it could almost pass for one, since some of the pieces are there. For example, Roberts is credible enough as a bad guy. Plug someone else in as Blackley, give them a better script and this could be no worse than most Netflix Originals.
Though if you did all that, it would be a completely different film, one which likely came and went without making much of a ripple in public consciousness (see also: just about every Netflix Original). We’d then have missed out on the monument to hubris which resulted. It is an object demonstration – possibly even an abject one – of the fact that talent is a non-transferable commodity. Turns out, just because you’re world-class at waving your legs around in a rhythmic fashion, this does not necessarily make you any good as a screenwriter, director or actor. Who knew? Well, given by Flatley’s cinema career apparently being one and done, it appears he did at least learn this valuable lesson.