The Tiger's Tail (2007)

Very well executed

Absolutely brilliant

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

listen, to be honest i am actually writing this as i am watching the film. i only gave it a 5 out of ten because i am not finished watching it.i don't even know if i will finish it if Kim Cattrall keeps coming into screen. how could not one person tell her that she doesn't sound Irish. and if she is speaking with an Irish accent i would love to know what county she is supposed to be from. why the hell would you hire a muck actor from America to play a roll that even someone from fair city could have pulled off.i wish there was a way that i could actually ask Kim, what she was thinking when she was jabbering on in a funky accent.thats the worst thing about foreign actors, mainly American playing Irish and Brit's on screen, they cant do it. except John Voight in "The General", great job he done.any how, this isn't really a review more a rant, i just needed to share it.

Hmm.Sadly, "The Tiger's Tail" is rubbish, and a major disappointment, because John Boorman is a great director who has made some great films. You know what I'm talking about. "Point Blank", "Deliverance", "Excalibur", "The General", "The Tailor Of Panama", "Beyond Rangoon", "The Emerald Forest". You can look up the others for yourselves.Brenda Gleeson plays Liam O'Leary, a Dublin property developer, who's life gets changed completely when he finds himself being stalked by a doppelganger.I have no idea what happened here, but "The Tiger's Tail" is a complete misfire and a total waste of an interesting actor in Brendan Gleeson. It fails completely as a drama and/or a black comedy, chiefly because it is not dramatic enough and it is not funny enough. I can suspend belief as well as the next man, but I didn't believe a word of "The Tiger's Tail".And the cardinal sin? "The Tiger's Tail" is boring, boring, boring, dull, dull, dull. Maybe I'm missing the subtext somewhere. I'm not too clever.Such a shame. Onto the next one, Mister Boorman.

I was an extra on this movie, in the Awards Dinner scene near the beginning, and I looked forward to the finished product with some trepidation because the dialog seemed quite poor. However, i have been pleasantly surprised. This is a good movie, and maybe I'm stupid but I didn't see the ending coming; It thought it was a very good resolution, and I don't understand why one reviewer says it leaves numerous threads hanging. I thought all of the production values the music and everything were very good. My criticisms would be the same for most Irish movies; the relatively poor acting of the more junior actors (I refer in particular to the drunken girlfriend we first encounter in the Temple Bar nightclub. There were other weaknesses, things that could have been much better handled such as the first appearance of the doplleganger, and O'Leary getting coshed in the toilets (again, bad acting by the other actors there). Some things were just stupid, like the statement that the more houses O'Leary builds the more homeless there are; Boorman should stick to the directing and leave the economics to others. Kim shouldn't have attempted the Oirish (sic) accent. It would have been quite believable for O'Leary to have married an American, and better, even.It gives a reasonably good insight into middle-class Ireland, and a glimpse of the world of the down-and-out (which is the same everywhere, I suppose). I stayed until the very end of the credits.

Just as Brendan Gleeson's character comes face to face with his mysterious double in "The Tiger's Tail", having seen the movie I am wondering if John Boorman himself has a doppelganger who directed this Hammer-style turkey. Where is the director of "Deliverance", "Point Blank" and "The General"? He's certainly not behind the camera lens in scenes where a supposedly famous property developer is charged in court with a plethora of offenses, yet his double is down the road running his property empire in his name and not even the most buffoonish of cops, judiciary, gutter press and nosy old ladies take one whit of notice; he's not present whenever Kim Cattrall speaks, her accent veering within scenes between Samantha's from SATC and Sean Connery's in "The Untouchables"; and he couldn't possibly have approved the unbelievably cozy pat and self-indulgent ending which leaves numerous significant story threads left hanging.The film is supposed to be a commentary on the dark side of the Irish economic boom and the ham fisted manner in which its benefits have been consumed and distributed. However the dogmatic exposition of these points within numerous scenes (and an appearance by a well known pseud Irish restaurant critic) confirms the movie as being cynically and deliberately designed to appeal to mid 1980s Irish social democrats who fought for change against a right wing Catholic Church and puppet government through the medium of a liberal, self-knowing and self-reverential press. They now find that winning the battle meant also losing their prized high moral ground and glowing (self) adoration. This wasn't part of the master plan at all. They can't take the fact that economic growth for all means no one pays them a smidgen of attention or glory anymore and Boorman has made this movie especially for them.Round this out with a padding of grizzled Irish acting washouts desperate for a paycheck and a "marriage movies and motherhood" article in a Sunday news-rag and you have what possibly is the most cynical, elitist and artistically challenged Irish movie of modern times.