Based on a true story, but did the opening from Casino really happen to Danny Greene? It’s impossible to describe Irishman without referencing some classic gangster testosterone-fest. That’s because the movie, based on real life Irish-American working class hero Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), who became president of his union and clashed with the mob in Cleveland, recycles pretty much all of Scorsese and Coppola’s best.
You don’t have to be a movie buff to realize that the opening of this movie is almost shot for shot the car bomb scene in Casino, complete with the driver surviving unharmed, and the sequence afterwards is Henry Hill’s childhood in Goodfellas. Those movies really explored what it meant to be in the mob, or to deal with them. Sure, Danny Greene is as likable as Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill or DeNiro’s Rothstein, but that’s where the similarities end. What follows is an assembly-line gangster movie, where Greene gets power (he becomes the new union president by slapping his corrupt predecessor, I’m not kidding) and a fearsome reputation, then loses his wife and family (that we never really knew much about).
There’s dialogue that tries hard to be witty, like Greene’s rant about haggis, after an employee calls him a “potato-eater.” There’s a lot of people killed with car bombs, which quickly become boring and lose their shock value. There’s plenty of familiar faces: Vince D’Onofrio, Paul Sorvino, and Christopher Walken, but this is a not a movie that’s as good as its cast.
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