Michael Collins (film)
It is written and directed by Neil Jordan and stars Liam Neeson in the title role, along with Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, and Julia Roberts.Ned Broy, officially a member of the loyalist G Division, sympathises with the independence cause and tips Collins off that the Castle intends to arrest the entire Cabinet that evening.De Valera soon breaks out of Lincoln Prison, but announces on his return to Ireland that he will go to the United States to seek President Woodrow Wilson's official recognition of the Irish Republic.The war continues to intensify; the British assign SIS Officer Soames to counter the Irish Republican Army, though he and several of his agents are killed in an attack orchestrated by Collins.To retaliate, the Black and Tans are sent to Dublin to brutally open fire on unarmed citizens who were in support of an independent Ireland; culminating in a massacre at Croke Park, in which 14 people are murdered during a peaceful Gaelic football game.Adamant in his approach to securing peace, de Valera orders a siege on The Custom House, but the Irish Republican Army suffers heavy casualties and the attack fails catastrophically.Michael Cimino wrote a script and was involved in pre-production work on a possible Collins film for over a year in the late 1980s, with Gabriel Byrne marked down to star.[6] Neil Jordan mentions in his film diary that Kevin Costner had also been interested in developing a movie about Collins, titled Mick, and had visited Béal na Bláth and the surrounding areas.It also led to Warner Bros. executive Rob Friedman pressuring the director to reshoot the ending to focus on the love story between Collins and Kiernan, in an attempt to downplay the breakdown of Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations.The site's consensus states: "As impressively ambitious as it is satisfyingly impactful, Michael Collins honors its subject's remarkable achievements with a magnetic performance from Liam Neeson in the title role.I was unable to leave the cinema at its end, so profoundly moved and saddened was I; and I can understand why Neil Jordan has been so personally offended by criticism of the film in Ireland and in Britain."[25] Geoff Andrew, writing in Time Out, said, "This is Jordan's most ambitious and satisfying movie - a thriller with a real sense of scale, pace, menace and moral import."[27] Ian Nathan of Empire awarded the film four stars out of five, and described it as a "mature, passionate biography of the tragic Irish revolutionary [which] takes a considered, intelligent stance.