The recent 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement underscored how much the Troubles, and those many years of bloodshed, have receded into historical memory. With the wounds less raw, it’s easier to mine the period for drama spiked with high-stakes violence and leavened with moral conundrums about justice, loyalty and political expediency. Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett is just the right man to map out this terrain. It’s not just his having roots in the region that helps, but also his longtime involvement in British crime drama, from Face back in 1997 through TV series Top Boy, to historical mini-series Gunpowder about the Guy Fawkes plot.
The script for Dead Shot, co-written by Bennett and directors Charles and Thomas Guard, has a crunchy veracity, and feels like it’s getting the details right, especially in how ideology trickles down into daily lives. The direction is perhaps less distinctive, but the bones of something strong, original and evocative are there. Like so many tales of men locked in a lethal dance of destruction by the accidents of war, this revolves around two guys on opposing sides who might have, in another place and time, rather liked each other, but are compelled to destroy one another in this world.
