Good old fashioned gangster movie about the glory days of the Mob in Cleveland and one Danny Greene who remains in thorn in their side for several years. The cast has a lot of regulars from other mobster movies, with the noticeable exception of the lead, Ray Stevenson, who seems to have been in a lot of things I am unfamiliar with.
Kill The Irishman is the story of tough guy and mob boss Danny Greene who had a knack for being around cars when they blew up and liked nothing better than beating people to death to while away the odd hour.
Amazingly, this thug is a pretty likeable hero. He is kind enough to his wife and kids-though she finally has enough of his hyper violent ways and leaves him. He has a tight knit group of fellow gangsters and he is friends and rivals with the regular old school Sicilian mobsters who run most of he crime in Cleveland.
One of the more interesting actors is Christopher Walken, who plays an old school loan shark who first befriends Danny, but later puts a contract out on him. This leads to Walken being blow up by a car bomb. There are a lot of car bombs here-old news footage says there are something like 37 car bombs that year. One things about these Cleveland mobsters, they were not a bashful lot.
I had never heard of Danny Greene, but it seems that he was sort of legend for his skill at not being shot or blown up himself-well, not at first anyway. It should come as no surprise that The Irishman gets blow up at the end of the film. It is a bit of a surprise that his death leads to a deal being made by the hit-man who whacked him. This deal brings down all kinds of mob bosses all over the country and pretty puts the Mob out of business in Cleveland.
