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Review: Bleak Drama Donnybrook

Feb 15th, 2019 Eric D. Snider
Review: Bleak Drama Donnybrook

Despite its happy, Irish-sounding title, Donnybrook is bleak misery porn about meth and meth-adjacent Midwesterners scrambling to survive and/or kill each other. It’s compelling stuff, written and directed with mean efficiency by Tim Sutton (Dark Night), but I wish the main character were more interesting and that the point were more insightful than “Golly, it sure sucks to be poor and desperate.”

Our bare-knuckled hero is Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell), a veteran in a trailer park with two filthy children and a junkie wife (Dara Tiller). Earl has had it up to HERE with Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), the brutal drug manufacturer/distributor who supplies junk to the missus and everyone else in town, and he starts a feud with Angus and his sister/business partner, Delia (Margaret Qualley), whom Angus treats like actual garbage and who is perhaps not entirely loyal to him. Having obtained the entry fee by robbing a gun store, Earl makes his way to the Donnybrook, an underground brawl offering $100K to the last man standing, pursued by Angus and Delia, all of them pursued by a cop (James Badge Dale) of questionable character.

Sutton, adapting Frank Bill’s novel, sustains a menacing tone throughout largely through the Angus character, a fearsome boogeyman with no compunctions about killing. Bell shows gritty strength as Jarhead Earl, but the character is stoic to the point of feeling under-written. Still, the showdowns among Earl, Angus, Delia, and the cop are viscerally effective — not to mention the Donnybrook itself, which is insane — and the whole thing has an appealing somberness to it.

Grade: B

1 hr., 41 min.; rated R for disturbing violent and sexual content, drug use, language, and some graphic nudity

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Eric D. Snider

Eric D. Snider

Eric D. Snider has been a film critic since 1999, first for newspapers (when those were a thing) and then for the internet. He was born and raised in Southern California, lived in Utah in his 20s, then Portland, now Utah again. He is glad to meet you, probably.

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