Perrier's Bounty Review
By David Kempler
Partially Diluted Bounty
What happens when you put together a good cast, oddball characters, a pretty fair story, some modest thrills, and top it off with some very funny scenes? Surprisingly, not all that much worth talking about. At least that's the case in Ian Fitzgibbon's "Perrier's Bounty".
What should be a rollicking good time is instead a series of vignettes that don't work cohesively. Many are great, others fall flat. The net result is like eating at a buffet that varies greatly in quality. When you describe your experience to a friend afterwards, they will not know whether to frequent the buffet or not. At least they will have the chance to pick and choose what to eat. You can't pick which scenes to watch in a film.
Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) is a fringe kind of guy who owes money to Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson), a tough-guy, head-of-the-mob gangster. The always reliable, and sometimes perfect, Gleeson is caught between being funny and scary and that doesn't work, or at least almost never does. De Niro has pulled it off many times but he's De Niro.
When Perrier wants his cash, Brenda (Jodie Whittaker), Michael's ex and now good friend, inadvertently gets involved in the caper when she murders one of the bad guys. Michael's dad, Jim (Jim Broadbent), enters the fray by announcing that he has terminal cancer. Normally this might be seen as somewhat bad news, but it has set Jim free to do whatever he wants, no matter how odd or counter-productive his actions might be. Jim is the only character who hits the mark in every single scene. He alone has captured the elusive combo of thrills and belly laughs. If not for him, this whole thing would have been one gigantic waste of time.
Fitzgibbon and his cast try real hard to make it work but the task is daunting and cannot be overcome, except for Jim, of course. "Perrier's Bounty" is still worth it, but this particular bounty is not worth a great deal of hunting.
