For the previous two films in this trilogy I had my reservations even though I enjoyed the grim tone and the good performances from a host of recognizable faces. I think part of it was that it felt like maybe there wasn't much behind the atmosphere and grim faces but that this delivery worked in its favor? Perhaps but for sure in this final film the content is really rather exposed as not being up to as much as the critical praise would suggest and ultimately we have a rather unsatisfying conclusion which retrospectively hurts the other films as well.
Where the films started out with corruption lurking behind murders, they generally were just about kept believable within the real world context that the films tried to retain. In this final one though it really feels like it gets too big and too serious and I found it hard to get into because it all became such a fiction. The plot here jumps back and forth in time but does so without any warning or signal that it will do so, which did throw me for a few seconds as I tried to figure out why characters who had died seemed to be up and about showing no signs of death. This occurs to fill in details and information to help us with the current plot (a lawyer investigates the original swan-wing killing while a policeman reaches the end of his moral tether) however there is a problem with this structure. The problem is that it feels like we were deliberately kept in the dark – I understand some of it is a mystery which is being revealed but it was known from the first film who did the killings and who was involved in the cover-up and why they did it, so the flashback don't "reveal" so much as flesh out and they do it in a way that made me wonder why such scenes were not in it earlier since I was there at the time.
These things distracted me from the biggest annoyance which is that this film connects to the first one but has very little with the second film. The reason I rushed into seeing this third one was the basis of the revelations and twists at the end of the second film and it was disappointing to see that basically the second film would easily have been dropped since it doesn't add a great deal in the middle when viewed in context of the complete trilogy. The irony is that the third film is significantly weaker than the second one. The time-jumping is a little off-balancing although it does work in filling in the character of Maurice at least but I really didn't like the use of the medium as a major plot device – it really clashes with the grim realism thing it had been doing and just seems lazy as a piece of writing. The connections all coming together don't satisfy as they should either – again the bigger they get the less they work and the network is too tight to convince.
The performances and the grim atmosphere continue to cover for the weaknesses. Addy is good because at least his performance differs from the majority since he is more innocent and wide-eyed than the grim lot. Morrissey plays the other extreme well but mostly it is dead-eyed tiredness that he does, albeit well. Support from Clarke, Carter and others is good but in some cases they have little to work with in their characters (Mullan in particular). It is a shame then, but this film doesn't come together and it is additionally disappointing since this third film needed to bring the other two to a close and make the trilogy strong. It doesn't do this and instead it feels like the material reaches too far and unravels as it approaches an unsatisfyingly convenient and delivered conclusion. I quite enjoyed the previous two films even though I didn't see what all the critics and IMDbers were raving about – in the light of the third I am even more mystified about why this trilogy got such universal adoration.
Where the films started out with corruption lurking behind murders, they generally were just about kept believable within the real world context that the films tried to retain. In this final one though it really feels like it gets too big and too serious and I found it hard to get into because it all became such a fiction. The plot here jumps back and forth in time but does so without any warning or signal that it will do so, which did throw me for a few seconds as I tried to figure out why characters who had died seemed to be up and about showing no signs of death. This occurs to fill in details and information to help us with the current plot (a lawyer investigates the original swan-wing killing while a policeman reaches the end of his moral tether) however there is a problem with this structure. The problem is that it feels like we were deliberately kept in the dark – I understand some of it is a mystery which is being revealed but it was known from the first film who did the killings and who was involved in the cover-up and why they did it, so the flashback don't "reveal" so much as flesh out and they do it in a way that made me wonder why such scenes were not in it earlier since I was there at the time.
These things distracted me from the biggest annoyance which is that this film connects to the first one but has very little with the second film. The reason I rushed into seeing this third one was the basis of the revelations and twists at the end of the second film and it was disappointing to see that basically the second film would easily have been dropped since it doesn't add a great deal in the middle when viewed in context of the complete trilogy. The irony is that the third film is significantly weaker than the second one. The time-jumping is a little off-balancing although it does work in filling in the character of Maurice at least but I really didn't like the use of the medium as a major plot device – it really clashes with the grim realism thing it had been doing and just seems lazy as a piece of writing. The connections all coming together don't satisfy as they should either – again the bigger they get the less they work and the network is too tight to convince.
The performances and the grim atmosphere continue to cover for the weaknesses. Addy is good because at least his performance differs from the majority since he is more innocent and wide-eyed than the grim lot. Morrissey plays the other extreme well but mostly it is dead-eyed tiredness that he does, albeit well. Support from Clarke, Carter and others is good but in some cases they have little to work with in their characters (Mullan in particular). It is a shame then, but this film doesn't come together and it is additionally disappointing since this third film needed to bring the other two to a close and make the trilogy strong. It doesn't do this and instead it feels like the material reaches too far and unravels as it approaches an unsatisfyingly convenient and delivered conclusion. I quite enjoyed the previous two films even though I didn't see what all the critics and IMDbers were raving about – in the light of the third I am even more mystified about why this trilogy got such universal adoration.