Dead Shot (Review) - Cinerama Film

Dead Shot premieres on Sky Cinema on Friday 12th May.

Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett is no stranger to gritty drama; from the TV series Top Boy to the made-for-TV film The Hamburg Cell and the BBC historical mini-series Gunpowder, he knows how to build tension and keep the viewer’s eyes glued to the screen. Written and directed by Charles Guard and Thomas Guard, based on Bennett’s screenplay, the Guard Brothers take us back to the height of the Troubles that haunted our island nations with Dead Shot, an atmospheric and gritty revenge thriller.

Set in the early 1970s, Colin Morgan is a retired IRA paramilitary man living in Northern Ireland who longs for escape alongside his heavily pregnant wife, played by Máiréad Tyers. But as the baby announces its intention to arrive, tragedy strikes as they encounter a troupe of British SAS soldiers. As Morgan runs from the car seeking safety on the instruction of his wife, a young soldier, played by Aml Ameen, believes him to still be in the car and fires through the windscreen, killing his wife and their unborn child. Believing Morgan’s character to be dead, the soldier returns to his barracks, where his superior officer, Mark Strong, enlists him as an agent for a dedicated group hunting IRA members in London. Little does the soldier know that Morgan’s character is alive and heading to London to exact his revenge.

The hunt sees two men pitted against one another in a web of secrets, lies, manipulation and intrigue on central London’s cold, dark streets. It’s on these streets that Dead Shot bathes us in an atmospheric vision of 70s London, from its smoke-filled pubs to its vibrant street markets and rundown back alleys. You can almost taste the cigarette smoke and the warm beer as the Guard Brothers recreate a long-lost city of grit and grime.

But it is the darkness of the Troubles that makes Dead Shot tick – a horror slowly sliding from memory in a world where the Troubles have, thankfully, largely been assigned to history. Here we witness the social and personal destruction of the Troubles through the eyes of two men caught in a trap of self-destruction. The names of these men are irrelevant, as their lives and souls have been consumed by history and politics, their final days already mapped out, even if they don’t know it yet by the puppet masters holding their strings.

While elements of Dead Shot are predictable, and it sometimes loses focus, there is a raw and unrelenting atmosphere of impending doom from the first scene to the last as it twists and turns through London’s vast network of bustling grey streets and dark lonely alleys.