Butler's Cinema Scene

Jamie Bell

“DONNYBROOK”  My rating: C (Opens Feb. 15 at the Screenland  Tapcade)

101 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Donnybrook” is a fistful of  cheap melodrama, what with its emphasis on the drugs and violence its protagonist encounters en route to an underground bareknuckle slugfest.

At least give writer/director Tim Sutton props for trying to elevate this yarn with the sort of ashcan realism and social commentary most commonly found in the work of Brit auteur Ken Loach (“The Angels’ Share,” “Jimmy’s Hall,” “I, Daniel Blake”).

Which is not to say that Sutton pulls it off. You can see him struggling to give this chunk of cheese relevance by peppering it with  observations on blue-collar American angst.  That approach worked in “Hell or High Water”; here not much of it sticks.

When we first encounter Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell…yeah, the original Billy Elliott) he’s robbing a gun store and smashing the owner in the face.  This is our hero?

Well, yeah.  Jarhead  may do bad things, but he does them to support his meth head wife (Valerie Jane Parker) and two young kids. By the logic of “Donnybrook” this makes him a hero.  Everybody else in sight is far worse.

Especially Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), the neighborhood drug dealer.  Accompanied by his sister Delia (Margaret Qualley),  with whom he has a master/slave relationship that reeks of incest, Chainsaw cuts a wide path of bloody destruction.  He may be the only dealer who’d rather kill his clients than sell them drugs.

Frank Grillo

Sutton’s screenplay (based on Frank Bill’s novel) has Jarhead uprooting his family to get away from bad debts and especially the malevolent Chainsaw. Stashing his wife and daughter in safe place, he and his young boy set a course for a  town (the setting appears to be rural Ohio) that hosts an annual melee called Donnybrook. The winner of this last-man-standing free-for-all goes home with $100,000.

Along the way they join forces with Delia, who is desperate to ditch her homicidal sibling.

Of course, they’re pursued by the evil Chainsaw and, briefly, by a crooked local cop (James Badge Dale).

The film ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Bell is okay as Jarhead, balancing brutality with a desperate love for his family.  Grills pretty much steals the show as the scary Chainsaw.

Qualley, a regular on HBO’s “Leftovers” and recently seen as a nun-in-training in  “Novitiate,” is featured in one of the most jawdroppingly sick scenes in recent cinema. Let’s just say it involves sex as a tool of assassination.

“Donnybrook” is meant to present a sympathetic picture of the struggling common American — the sort of guy who, we assume, voted for Trump (if he voted at all).  But in fact it has the opposite effect, presenting us with a world of unwavering cruelty and greed populated by wildly unpleasant individuals.

| Robert W. Butler