Kill the Irishman (2011)

Kill the Irishman is a small crime film about a man I’d never heard of, and it’s a genuinely good one. Danny Greene took on the Cleveland mafia in the seventies, survived bomb after bomb and became a local legend for it.

Jonathan Hensleigh directed it in 2011. I give it a 7.

The Premise

Greene comes up on the Cleveland docks, takes over the longshoremen’s union, loses it to corruption charges and goes into business with the mob as a collector. When he decides he won’t be their errand boy, they try to kill him, and he starts killing back. Cleveland had thirty-odd car bombings in 1976, which is how it got called Bomb City.

The Stevenson Performance

Ray Stevenson plays Greene as a big, cheerful Irish brawler who reads history books and believes he can’t be killed. He’s charming enough that you forget he’s a criminal, which is probably how the real man worked too.

The Supporting Cast

Christopher Walken plays the loan shark Shondor Birns, Vincent D’Onofrio is a mob boss who becomes his friend, Val Kilmer is the detective who grew up with him and narrates, and Paul Sorvino and Tony Darrow fill out the mafia. It’s a lot of good actors in a modest film.

The Cleveland Period Setting

The film is fond of Cleveland, the neighborhoods, the union halls and the Irish and Italian blocks that hated each other. It’s made cheaply and it shows in a few places, and the period detail is convincing.

The Consequences

Greene was finally killed by a car bomb in 1977. What the film doesn’t have room to say is how much that mattered: the arrests and informants that followed helped the FBI break the mafia’s grip on several American cities.

Craft Note

Is Kill the Irishman worth watching?

Yes. It’s a 7, a solid crime story about a man worth knowing about, and Ray Stevenson is excellent.

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