This movie was filmed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, all places my son and I visited by train about 20 years ago. For me that was a highlight of watching this, to see those places again.
I found it on Netflix streaming movies.
It is Robbie's story. Having grown up in a rough part of Glasgow he has already in his young age had a series of bad encounters with the law. He is a hot-head too, and when disrespected can easily go off to almost killing the victim. Now he has also gotten his girlfriend Leonie pregnant, much to the dissatisfaction of her dad, who even tries to bribe him with money to leave and never see his daughter again. Robbie doesn't have very good prospects.
Robbie's life begins to change when get gets on a work payback group for non capital offenders, basically being a supervised work crew to pay back society for their crimes. The monitor of the group, and the man with the van, gets them interested in Scotch Whiskey, and the title of this movie arises from a distillery tour when the young guide explains that in barrel aging a small percentage of the whiskey is lost forever through evaporation and they call that "the angel's share."
(NB - The Jim Beam company calls the whiskey trapped inside the wood at the end of aging, "the devil's share", and even sell a whiskey of that name where they claim to have extracted it from the wood. I have some and it in fact is pretty good.)
Anyway it turns out Robbie has a natural nose for discerning different qualities of whiskey, and I naturally thought that would lead him into getting a job with a distillery and be able to leave his former life, and build something better for Leonie and him. But the movie takes a quite different turn.
Good movie, I enjoyed it for the characters and the subject, both redemption and imagining being there in the whiskey tastings.
SPOILERS: Robbie finds out a very rare, very old whiskey is to be sold at auction, and in fact one bottle ended up going for over One Million pounds. But before the auction Robbie hatched a plan with his friends on the work gang, they visited the distillery, Robbie managed to hide among the casks through the night, his friends were outside with empty one- liter soda bottles, he opened the valuable cask and used long clear tubing to siphon off enough to fill 4 bottles. Then he took ordinary whiskey to back fill so that the 4 liters would not be missed. Even when cops stopped and searched them randomly afterwards, all the cops saw were 4 bottles of what they thought was soda. Robbie learned of a black market buyer and sold a bottle for 200,000 pounds and split it with the other 3, and bargained for a job for himself in the whiskey business. His hapless friends broke two of the bottles in a moment of stupidity, and he gave the 4th to the work supervisor who had introduced him to whiskey. But Robbie, Leonie, and their new baby were off to a new life near Stirling.
(NB- About 20 years ago we spent two nights in a hotel in Stirling which I like to describe as "the worst hotel in all of Scotland." It was their last weekend of operation, I suspect it was being demolished afterwards. The only good part was that they let us stay free, that's how close to "camping" it was. But I will always remember that hotel stay.)
I found it on Netflix streaming movies.
It is Robbie's story. Having grown up in a rough part of Glasgow he has already in his young age had a series of bad encounters with the law. He is a hot-head too, and when disrespected can easily go off to almost killing the victim. Now he has also gotten his girlfriend Leonie pregnant, much to the dissatisfaction of her dad, who even tries to bribe him with money to leave and never see his daughter again. Robbie doesn't have very good prospects.
Robbie's life begins to change when get gets on a work payback group for non capital offenders, basically being a supervised work crew to pay back society for their crimes. The monitor of the group, and the man with the van, gets them interested in Scotch Whiskey, and the title of this movie arises from a distillery tour when the young guide explains that in barrel aging a small percentage of the whiskey is lost forever through evaporation and they call that "the angel's share."
(NB - The Jim Beam company calls the whiskey trapped inside the wood at the end of aging, "the devil's share", and even sell a whiskey of that name where they claim to have extracted it from the wood. I have some and it in fact is pretty good.)
Anyway it turns out Robbie has a natural nose for discerning different qualities of whiskey, and I naturally thought that would lead him into getting a job with a distillery and be able to leave his former life, and build something better for Leonie and him. But the movie takes a quite different turn.
Good movie, I enjoyed it for the characters and the subject, both redemption and imagining being there in the whiskey tastings.
SPOILERS: Robbie finds out a very rare, very old whiskey is to be sold at auction, and in fact one bottle ended up going for over One Million pounds. But before the auction Robbie hatched a plan with his friends on the work gang, they visited the distillery, Robbie managed to hide among the casks through the night, his friends were outside with empty one- liter soda bottles, he opened the valuable cask and used long clear tubing to siphon off enough to fill 4 bottles. Then he took ordinary whiskey to back fill so that the 4 liters would not be missed. Even when cops stopped and searched them randomly afterwards, all the cops saw were 4 bottles of what they thought was soda. Robbie learned of a black market buyer and sold a bottle for 200,000 pounds and split it with the other 3, and bargained for a job for himself in the whiskey business. His hapless friends broke two of the bottles in a moment of stupidity, and he gave the 4th to the work supervisor who had introduced him to whiskey. But Robbie, Leonie, and their new baby were off to a new life near Stirling.
(NB- About 20 years ago we spent two nights in a hotel in Stirling which I like to describe as "the worst hotel in all of Scotland." It was their last weekend of operation, I suspect it was being demolished afterwards. The only good part was that they let us stay free, that's how close to "camping" it was. But I will always remember that hotel stay.)