Despite its happy, Irish-sounding title, Donnybrook<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is 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<\/em>), 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Despite its happy, Irish-sounding title, Donnybrook\u00a0is bleak misery porn about meth and meth-adjacent Midwesterners scrambling to survive and\/or kill each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":10267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1416,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-festivals","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 41 min.; rated R for\u00a0disturbing violent and sexual content, drug use, language, and some graphic nudity<\/em><\/h5>\n
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