Excellent simple story about moral responsibility

I had hoped this film would be good as I knew Ted Demme directed it and I had previously seen beautiful girls and blow which were great so i was interested to see what he did with a crime story like this.

I loved the way it was just a simple well directed, well acted, very irish story about moral responsibility and deciding where our loyalties lie. Bobby was obviously having his pockets lined by his boss but his boss pushed it far too far by not only killing one but two of his family members. Just like in shakespeare's hamlet, bobby was full of hesitation and doubt in exacting revenge until it became impossible to stop himself.

In fact, i think if colm meaney hadn't passed that commment at the end as bobby was leaving, bobby may not have even gone through with it. It was colm meaney's cocky bastard attitude and his insistence on rubbing it in bobby's face that made him deserve it.

Previous posters have complained about there being no ending and that nothing happened - they have missed the point of the film completely - viewers have said this because they are just so used to seeing other films where there are huge shoot em ups and massive revenge shootings made.

The reality is though that shootings are usually small in number and they are not as easy to go through with as often made out in films. You have to remember bobby is deciding to kill his boss, a major criminal in the area and a powerful guy - what we don't see is the very real likelihood that bobby may get killed in retaliation after the film was over.

What happens after though is not the point of the film - it's the difficulty of bobby wrestling with the decision. Excellent film - subtle, single-shot long dialogue scenes and very good casting throughout. I have always thought that the actor playing the young irish cousin (who was in the film titanic) can't act very well but this is only a small complaint in an otherwise very good film.