The Devil’s Own (1997)

(On Cable TV, December 2015) I tried getting into this film.  I really did.  But as it turns out, there’s no real way to get me to care about an IRA terrorist presented semi-sympathetically as he lands in New York to procure missiles and lodges at a NYPD cop’s place.  I mean: what’s up with that?  While The Devil’s Own does at least offer the chance to see (younger) Harrison Ford up against (much younger) Brad Pitt, the film itself is dullness stretched into infinity.  It doesn’t help that the climax is weak, and the two or three interesting action scenes (a household shootout; a police car escape) seem disconnected from the rest of the film.  Now, I will admit that I more or less stopped paying attention midway through, so when I say that the last half seems more and more incoherent, I may not exactly be speaking from a position of absolute knowledge.  Still, the damage has been done by then (the beginning isn’t necessarily more cohesive either) and the rest of the film didn’t manage to bring me back in.  I’ve been binging so many good-to-great late-nineties thrillers lately that I was getting worried that I had only missed the better ones.  The Devil’s Own reassures me that, no, I had managed to miss a few of the worse ones as well.