7 / 10
Official trailer
A Gangster Story Most People Never Heard
Kill the Irishman tells a true story that most people outside Cleveland have never heard, and it’s among the strangest in American crime. Danny Greene was a dockworker who became a union boss, then a loan shark, an enforcer and finally an open rival to the Mafia, and in the mid-seventies his war with the mob turned Cleveland into a city of car bombs. He survived attempt after attempt on his life, and he seemed to enjoy taunting the men trying to kill him.
Jonathan Hensleigh directed it for a limited release in March 2011, adapting Rick Porrello’s book To Kill the Irishman.
It barely made a ripple at the box office, and it has found a steady audience since on home video and streaming. My rating is a 7. This is a scrappy, low-budget gangster film with a great central character, a strong lead and more energy than polish.
I had a good time with this one, and I’d have had a better one if the film had half the discipline of its lead actor. Danny Greene is the kind of real person a screenwriter would be told to tone down, and I like that Hensleigh mostly lets him be as loud as he was. My reservation keeps coming back all the way through: the film likes him too much.
The Docks
The story begins with Greene working on the Cleveland docks in the early sixties, a tough, clever Irish-American with a temper and a talent for standing up to bullies. The union that runs the docks is corrupt, and when Greene challenges its leadership, he wins. He becomes president of the local longshoremen’s union, and for a while he looks like a working-class hero.
Then the money starts to disappear. Greene is convicted of embezzling union funds, loses his position and turns to work that pays better and asks fewer questions. He becomes an enforcer and loan shark for Shondor Birns, an older Jewish gangster played by Christopher Walken, and from there, the road leads into the Cleveland underworld and its uneasy relationship with the Italian Mafia.
Hensleigh moves through these early years quickly, sometimes too quickly, and it relies on narration and period footage to fill the gaps.
It works well enough to set up the man and the city, and to show how a union reformer turned into a gangster. Greene’s early speeches about fairness for working men sound sincere. That makes his slide into crime more interesting than a simple rise-and-fall story.
For Writers
Greene begins as a union reformer who stands up to corrupt bosses and ends as a gangster. The film shows how a man can slide from hero to criminal in small steps.
When you write a character’s fall, the most convincing ones happen gradually, through choices that each seem reasonable at the time. Map your character’s descent as a series of small, justifiable decisions. Let the reader agree with the first few before realizing where they lead.
Ray Stevenson
Ray Stevenson plays Greene, and he’s the reason to watch the film. He’s big, charming, funny and frightening, a man who quotes Celtic legends, wears green for luck and believes he’s destined for greatness. Stevenson gives him a swaggering confidence that makes it easy to see why men followed him and why his enemies hated him.
He also plays the contradictions. Greene loves his Irish heritage, his family and his neighborhood, and he’s ruthless with anyone who crosses him. He helps his elderly neighbors and blows up his rivals’ cars. Stevenson makes all of it belong to one man, and it’s the best performance of his career. Few actors could make a man this violent this likeable, and Stevenson does it without ever asking the audience to forgive him.
Stevenson died in 2023, and it bothers me how rarely anyone handed him a lead this strong. He had the presence of a major star, and I’d put this performance up against plenty of bigger names in bigger gangster films. He carries every scene, and I felt the film go slack every time he walked out of frame.
Walken, Kilmer and D’Onofrio
For its budget, Kill the Irishman has an unusually deep supporting cast. Christopher Walken plays Shondor Birns, Val Kilmer plays a police detective who grew up with Greene, Vincent D’Onofrio plays John Nardi, a union official with Mafia ties who becomes Greene’s ally, and Paul Sorvino plays Tony Salerno, a New York mob boss. Vinnie Jones plays Keith Ritson, Greene’s loyal, violent enforcer.
Robert Davi plays Ray Ferritto, the hitman eventually hired to kill Greene, and Linda Cardellini plays Greene’s wife. Most of these actors have only a few scenes, and some roles feel underwritten, but their presence gives the film the feel of seventies gangland, with familiar faces in every corner. Spotting them is part of the fun.
Walken, in particular, is excellent in his brief role, playing Birns as a weary, dangerous old gangster who underestimates the young Irishman and pays for it. Their scenes together, the old gangster and the ambitious newcomer sizing each other up over drinks, are the best in the film.
Bomb City
At its center is the war between Greene and the Cleveland Mafia in the mid-seventies. Greene and his allies refuse to pay tribute to the mob and try to take over its rackets, and both sides begin planting bombs. In 1976 alone, the city saw dozens of bombings, and newspapers began calling Cleveland the bombing capital of America.
Greene becomes a target again and again. His house is blown up, his car is rigged, and gunmen come after him, and he survives every time, often walking away from the rubble unhurt. The film shows several of these escapes, and they have a darkly comic quality: the Irishman who can’t be killed, taunting the mob on television and in the newspapers.
The story is wild, and the film captures its chaos. The film shows some of the bombings with archive news footage, and the mix of real and recreated material gives the film a documentary edge. Seeing the real wreckage on grainy local news footage makes it clear that nobody invented any of this for the screen.
For Writers
Greene survives bomb after bomb and taunts the Mafia in the newspapers. His apparent invincibility becomes both his legend and the source of the story’s tension.
If your character keeps escaping danger, the reader starts to expect it, and the tension fades. The trick is to make each escape narrower and costlier than the last. Each near miss the character survives should be more dangerous than the one before, so the reader senses the luck running out.
The Irish Legend
Greene saw himself as a Celtic warrior, and the film embraces the mythology. He talks about Irish heroes, keeps the green flag flying and treats his war with the Mafia as a struggle between the Irish and the Italians for control of the city. His followers are loyal, his neighborhood adores him, and he becomes a local folk figure.
Hensleigh sometimes buys into Greene’s view of himself a little too readily.
The film cares far more about Greene’s charisma than about the damage he did, and his victims barely register, and that loses me. I have no use for a lecture here. Still, I wanted one scene where somebody on the receiving end of a Greene bomb got a face and a name, and the romantic framing is the film’s biggest weakness.
The romance reflects how Greene was seen in his own neighborhood. Many people in Cleveland’s Irish community admired him as a man who stood up to the Mafia and gave back to his neighbors, and the film captures that local legend accurately. What it doesn’t do is question the legend, and a sharper film would have.
The End of Danny Greene
Greene was killed in October 1977, when a car bomb planted in a vehicle parked beside his own exploded outside a dentist’s office in the Cleveland suburb of Lyndhurst. The killing comes near the end, and it plays with a sense of inevitability. After so many escapes, a trap he didn’t see finally caught the man who seemed indestructible.
His death had consequences far beyond Cleveland. The investigation into the bombing led to the arrest of Ray Ferritto, who became an informant, and his testimony, along with that of other mob figures, helped federal prosecutors bring cases against Mafia families across the country. The Irishman, as the epilogue makes clear, did more damage to the mob dead than alive.
The epilogue lays out the fallout in a series of title cards, and I think it’s the smartest thing the film does. It turns the story of one gangster into the story of how a whole criminal network began to come apart. It’s a strange legacy for a man who spent his life fighting the mob for control of its rackets and never set out to destroy it.
For Writers
Greene’s death leads to informants and prosecutions that damage the Mafia nationwide. The story’s biggest consequence comes after its hero is gone.
A character’s death doesn’t have to end their influence. The ripples after a death can give a story a more powerful ending than the death itself. After your central character’s fate is settled, show what their life set in motion. Let the reader see the consequences that outlive them. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on character deaths that matter.
Cleveland in the Seventies
It’s also a portrait of a city in trouble. Cleveland in the seventies was losing its industry, its jobs and its population, and events like the 1969 fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River had battered its reputation. In 1978, a year after Greene’s death, it became the first major American city to default on its debts since the Great Depression.
That decline is the background to everything in the story. Unions, rackets and street gangs fought over a shrinking pie, and men like Greene saw opportunity in the chaos. The film doesn’t dwell on the economics, but its grimy streets, empty lots and smoke-filled bars convey a city where the old order was collapsing and anyone bold enough could grab a piece of what was left.
Low Budget, High Energy
The budget behind Kill the Irishman was modest, and you can see it in places. Some sequences look cramped, the period detail is uneven, and the constant use of archive footage sometimes feels like a way to save money on staging. The editing is choppy, and the film jumps across years without much warning.
It also has real energy. The pace is fast, the performances are committed, and the story is so strange and violent that it holds the attention even when the craft wavers. It feels like a hungry film made by people who believed in the story. That enthusiasm gets it through the rough patches.
The Case Against It
The film tries to cover too much ground in too little time. I’d happily have traded some of the title cards and archive footage for real scenes of Greene’s marriage, since Linda Cardellini barely gets a chance to play a person. The supporting cast is wasted in places, and the romantic view of Greene as a working-class Irish hero glosses over the violence and the victims until it sometimes feels closer to legend than biography.
It gets a 7. Watch it for Ray Stevenson, for a gangster story few people know and for the violent history of seventies Cleveland. It’s rough around the edges, and it’s never boring. For a film made on this budget, with this little attention on release, it holds up far better than many bigger gangster pictures.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The movie frames its violent hero as a Celtic legend, because that’s how he saw himself. The romance makes him compelling, and it also blurs what he did.
When you write about a real criminal or a charismatic villain, adopting their own myth can make the story vivid, and it can excuse the harm they caused.
If you write from inside a flawed hero’s self-image, give the reader at least one clear view from outside it, a victim, a witness, a consequence, so the myth doesn’t go unchallenged.
The Verdict on Kill the Irishman
It’s a 7 because Ray Stevenson and a startling true story drag it past a low budget, choppy editing and a hero worship I never fully bought. I enjoyed nearly every minute he was on screen, and I wish the film had asked one hard question about the man it so clearly adores. See it for Danny Greene and the chaos of seventies Cleveland, and forgive the rough edges.
