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The Devil's Own

1997

Alan J. Pakula

Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Rubén Blades ...

5.9

17,865

Thriller. Mystery Alan J. Pakula's last film, is a character-driven thriller that confronts suspense and gritty realism head-on. Harrison Ford plays Tom O'Meara, an Irish-American cop in New York who opens his home and family to Francis "Frankie" McGuire (Brad Pitt), whom they believe is a refuge-seeking immigrant from Belfast. They later discover that their visitor is an IRA rebel on a terrorist mission. Buoyed by tense, strong performances from both ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"Despite the toxic buzz, 'The Devil's Own' is a surprisingly coherent look at lawbreaking."	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"The moral reasoning in the film is so confusing that only by completely sidestepping it can the plot work at all (...) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Janet Maslin The New York Times	"'The Devil's Own' delivers two traffic-stopping star turns for the price of one (...) [It] certainly tracks more smoothly than might have been expected"	POS
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"Epically awful (...) It evokes everything that is wrong with Hollywood, from the industry’s obsession with casting to its inability to differentiate good scripts from bad."	NEG
United States	Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune	"It's a movie with many strong points, entertaining scenes, good moments. But, like Ireland, it's also a victim of partition, politics and misunderstanding (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Todd McCarthy Variety	"A reasonably engrossing, well-crafted suspenser (...) Pakula has managed to maintain an admirable concentration on the central moral equation"	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"Lacking the adrenalin of an out-and-out action movie, and without the intelligence to be much of anything else, the film has nowhere to go"	NEG
United Kingdom	Ian Nathan Empire	"Taken as a game of cat-and-mouse, this film works well. You just have to ignore the Irish political plot (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Carol Buckland CNN	"Pitt and Ford keep things interesting (...) The plot gets extremely murky at several points, and a number of secondary characters (...) are a mix of cardboard and cliche."	NEU
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"A welcome surprise (...) [A] quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama"	POS
United Kingdom	Alan Jones Radio Times	"A fudged disappointment (...) In the end, this is both dramatically and politically incorrect (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	James Berardinelli ReelViews	"To put it mildly, not good (...) There are problems, and some of them are fairly serious. But the movie as a whole isn't a complete and utter waste of time (...) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU

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