The Butcher Boy

Bomb Rating: 

During the course of the film, Francie starts seeing stuff,including alien heads on people and a Virgin Mary who talks to him. Shockingly, this Mary looks like Sinead O'Connor with hair and I seem to remember her using the word "fuck" at one point.

What kind of events lead a young boy to become a killer? Here's one for sure: he's fallen in love with the town's most exotic and beautiful woman. He's done this inadvertently because a dead friend made a last request of him to find the woman. So, he finds her, and falls in love with her and she takes him up to her room and just before they're about to do the horizontal lambada, the beautiful woman drops her drawers and reveals that she's not a beautiful woman at all but a penis-wielding man.

Neil ("The Crying Game") Jordan has sort of made "Halloween: The Early Years" by telling the story of young, Irish, Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), and his trip to the bountiful world of crime.

I guess that we're supposed to believe that because Francie's Da (Stephen Rea) is a drunk, his Ma (Aisling O'Sullivan) is going mad, and a lady in the neighborhood, Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), is mean to Francie, this is reason for him to become a deviant. Irish father a drunk? Oh, cry me a Guinness river you tosser. This is like a young Jack the Ripper blaming his rampage on a British father who wouldn't show him enough love. You and the rest of England, kid.

During the course of the film, Francie starts seeing stuff, including alien heads on people and a Virgin Mary who talks to him. Shockingly, this Mary looks like Sinead O'Connor with hair and I seem to remember her using the word "fuck" at one point. If only the Virgin could have been played by Jaye Davidson, Neil Jordan might have been in his own little filmmaking heaven.

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