Recensioni de* critic*

Demange's light touch on political disquisition serves well the frenetic pace of this film, allowing him to maintain full velocity without pausing to clearly identify or accurately position the various factions, informers, and double agents that complicate Hook's flight to safety. Yet, this ambitious action drama nonetheless skillfully folds subtle but substantive political nuances into its brisk running time.

Director Yann Demange's feature film debut merges Greengrass' kinetic camerawork with Sheridan's character-driven drama; the result is a taut, suspenseful and involving feature that runs a tight 99 minutes.

There's a tonal dissonance here: The gangster-movie dialogue of these different groups, as well as a somewhat lame late movie shoot-out, feel far removed from the terse, beautifully choreographed pandemonium of the film's first act. But whenever the film focuses on Gary, it's O'Connell's show. And the actor's ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he's limping and covered in blood.

O'Connell, so savage in Starred Up, makes a superbly terrified and helpless "hero" (if that's even the right word for someone who's just trying to survive), and he's surrounded by an equally agile cast of lesser-known actors, each of whom strives to achieve maximum ambiguity when it comes to the character's true motives. Only in the film's last third or so does it badly falter, embracing cheap cynicism that makes its conclusion feel aggressively facile rather than cathartic.

In " '71," an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye... Mr. O'Connell runs away with " '71," in which his character's every emotional, psychological and physical hurdle makes for kinetic cinema.

I wished Demange had stuck to the tautness and concentration of the film's main body, and kept us wondering if there was any world at all outside the combat zone that Hook falls. Otherwise, '71 is a dynamically effective piece of work, and a very economical one that doesn't have to use too much talk to bring home the point that war, as one character puts it, is a state of affairs in which "Posh cunts tell thick cunts to kill poor cunts.

Yann Demange's gut-wrenchingly tense '71 provides a snapshot of Northern Ireland's Troubles that is neither didactic nor exploitative. More impressively, its structure and plot convey the universal aspects of any intractable conflict or prolonged war, particularly the way in which youth take part—or, more accurately, get used. The all-too-familiar dynamic at play is perhaps most explicitly expressed when the British army is described as "rich cunts telling dumb cunts to kill poor cunts.

For all its flaws '71 offers a lapel-grabbing, immersive viewing experience likely to shake up audiences who couldn't otherwise care less about the boredom-factor whys and wherefores of Northern Ireland's bitterest years.

As the human face of the ‘long war', O'Connell is perfectly cast: he is by turns tough and vulnerable, equally convincing as an aggressor and victim. This is not a history lesson but more a story of one young man's education, and O'Connell, in yet another demanding leading role, absolutely nails it.

That the movie amounts to a basic declaration of these obvious truths is less disappointing than the fact that Demange is ultimately uninspired in expressing them. This reduces the centrality of O'Connell's physicality; even though the role has only meager requirements... the effectiveness of '71 tends to correlate directly with how closely it aligns itself with Hook's POV. Unfortunately, Demange and Burke save their most objective aims... for a finale that engages only with convention.

Punctuated by gimmicks that include red-headed little militants and war ravaged citizens inexplicably overcome with mercy when it's time to pull the trigger, '71 boasts its fair share of transparent conveniences. It works as an action film insofar as I was constantly anticipating when the next bomb was about to blow and who was going to make it out alive, but its suggestion that army men and secret police alike are desperate to do whatever it takes to stay alive is less than revelatory.

Tracking a British soldier (Jack O'Connell) abandoned by his unit after a deadly riot in Belfast during the year of the title, '71, though somewhat diminished by a trite ending, fluidly and potently stages its never-ending chaos, mayhem born of expedient, deadly alliances.