The title, besides being the name of an Irish folk song, is a fitting appellation for the young protagonist once he becomes an employee in a butcher shop: a square-faced little carrot-top with the mischievous look of a ventriloquist's dummy. This problem child of an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother, and ward of a stereotypically deviant Catholic priest, is given an added dimension through his access to a private gallery of adopted icons: pigs, the Lone Ranger, the Fugitive, the Bomb, alien invaders, the Virgin Mary. (The Fugitive is erroneously entrenched on television -- and in Ireland, yet! -- prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.) By means, however, of a rap sheet that ranges eventually from malicious vandalism to premeditated homicide and post-mortem mayhem -- the title then fits even more snugly -- he is removed from the normal sort of sympathy for such a protagonist. And in the fanciful imagery of director Neil Jordan -- e.g., singer Sinéad O'Connor dolled up as the Virgin, complete with nimbus, or a post-apocalyptic vision populated with charred pigs -- he is removed from the normal in other areas as well. And a break from normality, as this movie vividly reminds us, does not correspond automatically to a break from mediocrity. Most of the trouble is that the breaks are lopsidedly piled on in the movie's second half, after a discouraging first half of juiced-up realism nudgingly underscored with sprightly background music. The rest of the trouble is that the breaks, once they come, come with vulgar and self-congratulatory ostentation: too much, too late. Eamonn Owens, Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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