Michael Flatley’s BLACKBIRD will Irish jig its way into the hall of fame of so-bad-it’s-good movies
In his debut as writer/director/actor, the erstwhile “Lord of the Dance” makes his own (hilariously terrible) James Bond fanfic, starring… himself.
- “Is today the day you wish to confess your sins?”
- “Not today, Father. My sins are my own. No need to share them with you, or anyone else for that matter.”
When I was a wee lad, being born of an Irish mother meant that I was grandfathered (grandmothered?) into being a fan of Michael Flatley during his 90’s heyday. I used to watch the VHS of his Lord of the Dance stage show obsessively, to the point that one day, I got my sister to paint onto my chest a version of the blue Celtic symbol Flatley had on his chest on the video’s box art, and then I danced shirtlessly in front of the TV, uncoordinatedly mimicking his dancing. (I haven’t found any pictorial proof of that event I remember so clearly, but I am fearful there’ll come a day when I’m looking through old family photo albums, and find a 35mm photograph freezing that moment of cringe for eternity.)
So when I heard a couple of years ago that Michael Flatley had self-financed/written/directed/starred in his own film, which took four years to materialise after its intended 2018 release, and that it was a vanity project so hilariously terrible and lacking in self-awareness or talent in successfully aping the 007 influences it so shamelessly exhibited, that it was uncannily similar to Michael Scott’s Threat Level Midnight passion project/disasterpiece in The Office… well, you can accurately gauge that my interest was highly piqued.
How so-bad-it’s-good could it possibly be?
Let’s find out, via the running commentary of notes I took during my viewing of Blackbird…
• Nice drone camera you got there. Perhaps cut down a little on the scenic shots of Ireland’s pastoral beauty, and hasten to the crux of the opening scene, maybe?
• In the Obligatory Sad Funeral scene for the Obligatory Dead Wife Of Haunted Badass Protagonist, the authenticity of the Obligatory Sad Rainy Weather is undercut by how you can clearly see the different intersecting trajectories of the arcs of water spraying from the off-screen rain machines.
• Whenever he wears hats in this movie, including to his character’s wife’s funeral, Michael Flatley insists on wearing them at jaunty angles at all times, even though it looks adorably, unintentionally silly. Every time you see a shot of him donning his caps at crooked inclinations on his platinum blonde cranium, it is knee-jerk hilarious to behold.
• It’s going to be impossible to shake the Threat Level Midnight comparisons, isn’t it?
But that’s what these kinds of ego trip projects always are: “black tank top movies”, as coined by Red Letter Media, and named after the bizarre recurring trend of incompetent male multi-hyphenate auteurs, who produce indulgent independent films intended to showcase how awesome they are, somehow always depicting themselves wearing black tank tops. Whether it’s John De Hart in Champagne and Bullets (a.k.a. GetEven [sic]), Neil Breen in Double Down, or Tommy Wiseau in The Room, the black tank top is like a symbol for what all these films — including Flatley’s Blackbird — have in common. Much like Michael Scott, these middle-aged male creators all feel the need to concoct these wish-fulfilment film fantasies where they can cast themselves as aspirational paragons of masculinity, or at least what their perception of an ideal masculine figure would be. Most often, this manifests as them wanting to portray themselves in an action movie mode, as super special secret agents, super special skilled killers, or anyone who’s a super special Best Of The Best in their field of expertise. Someone powerful and quietly deadly, yet admired by other men, and ( of course) desired by all the hot young women throwing themselves at him, without him even needing to try. (To borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace, never underestimate how much these guys’ vanity projects can be motivated by “slimy phallocentric conduct”. Or in other words, them thinking with their trouser brains instead of their head brains.)
The problem these guys always get kneecapped by, however, is the unavoidable flaw of their idealised images of themselves being at complete odds with their real-life skills (or lack thereof) at writing, directing, and especially acting. You need supreme levels of charisma to pull off performing these kinds of badass-coded characters, and these “black tank top” types are never as charismatic as they wish they were.
In Blackbird, Michael Flatley wishes he was James Bond, but Flatley is no Sean Connery, no Roger Moore, no Timothy Dalton, no Pierce Brosnan, and no Daniel Craig. Hell, he’s no George Lazenby, either! (That’s not meant to be a dig at Lazenby, by the way, because his one-film stint as Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service saw him be just as adept in the role as any of his contemporaries. I just mean to say that Flatley doesn’t hold a candle — nay, even hold a match — to any of the Bonds we’ve had thus far, because Flatley can’t act for shit.)
• The cinematography is maddeningly inconsistent in its quality. Sometimes, some of the shots in this look pretty decently cinematic (see below). Other times, it looks like a cheap YouTube fan film, or one of those Wales Interactive FMV games.
• What in the nunsploitation is going on?
• These generic murderous goons have a bad case of Madame Web villain dubbing.
• To the lounge singer lady introduced to us in extreme close-up:
Love, I don’t think you were supposed to look at the camera!
Except… considering how many times other people — including Flatley himself — will soon go on to look down the barrel of the lens over the course of the film, maybe she was supposed to? Is Michael Flatley going for a Jonathan Demme or M. Night Shyamalan kind of thing, or perhaps some other films shot by Tak Fujimoto? (Spoiler alert: no, I think it’s simply that Flatley’s not a good director. He’s as bad at directing as he is good at dancing.)
• “Prepare the infinity suite.”
Why, is Thanos staying over?
• Flatley intends him and his actors’ pauses to be dramatic, but all they do is come off as actors struggling to remember their lines of terribly written dialogue. (Who wrote this film again? Oh, right, Flatley did.)
• The pretty singing lady (played by Mary Louise Kelly) couldn’t be any more from Belfast if she tried, dude. I’d recognise that flavour of Northern Irish lilt anywhere, thanks to my mother’s side of the family hailing from there.
• Flatley, why are you looking into the camera?
• “To the end?” “To the end.”
“My loyal soldier.”
Oh, these friends of Flatley’s are so dead.
• ERIC FUCKIN’ ROBERTS, HELL YEAH!
• To his slight credit, Flatley talking in a lower growly register does make him sound a bit like Liam Neeson. If only he had the acting chops to match.
• Flatley, please, I beg of you, STRAIGHTEN YOUR HAT!!
• This is some Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace level of ADR, only here it’s obviously not for (intentional) comedic effect. It’s especially prevalent with the Obligatory Old Flame character of Vivian (played by Nicole Evans), who is noticeably dubbed over for the entire film, and whose voice even sounds uncannily similar to Alice Lowe’s voice for Madeleine Wool in Darkplace. The constant mismatch between whatever natural audio was captured on set, and the pristine vocal booth-quality audio of her looping her own voice (assuming it is her voice, anyway), is quite distracting.
• Flatley, you’re supposed to tell your extras NOT to look at the camera when it passes them!
• Also, if you’re going to do some elaborately winding tracking shots around the Caribbean nightclub/hotel’s exterior set, maybe try to be more cognisant of the camera’s shadows.
(In all fairness, given what I assume was a limited budget, and the demands of Flatley’s ego, director of photography Luke Palmer breaks his back carrying this movie to make it at least look semi-decent.)
• So Flatley’s character, Victor “Blackbird” Blackley (I know, I know, try not to giggle too much), and Vivian — the Ilsa-from-Casablanca-esque archetype of the ex walking back into the life of our jaded protagonist, and who is married to Eric Roberts’ arms-dealing villain, Blake Molyneux — have a dance during this somewhat ambitious one-take sequence, ending with them silently touching foreheads together, holding on it a beat too long, to which the following groan-worthy exchange then arises:
VIVIAN: “Aren’t you going to say something?”
VICTOR: “I just did.”
Sweet Jesus! When I tell you I laughed so fucking hard…
• Is Flatley a fan of the Māori hongi tradition, or something? Dude’s touching foreheads with everyone at some point or another!
• Eric Roberts’ big bad guy evidently holds the formulas for a bioweapon that could be used to target specific “undesirables”. Since Blackbird was made in 2017/2018, this kinda sorta almost predicts the MacGuffin of the then-upcoming proper James Bond film (that’s also actually good), No Time to Die. If Flatley’s film hadn’t been unreleased for four years (presumably out of embarrassment from the minimal audience reaction he was privy to?), he may have been seen as oddly prescient, but instead, his film came out the year after No Time To Die. What luck.
• This flashback, of Flatley/Victor reminiscing about the good times he had with his dead wife, suddenly turned into the music video for Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ for a second there. Did they film in the same mansion, or something? (Incidentally, that’s Flatley’s own absurdly palatial mansion we see in the film. Dude’s fucking loaded.)
• Oh, good god, no.
So now we’ve got a scene where the pretty lounge singer named Madeleine (last name Wool?) knocks on Flatley’s door, walks into his room, and attempts to seduce him by stripping off her silky robe, wearing only high heels, and the bottom half of a set of black underwear.
But instead of doing what many black tank top male filmmakers often do, and writing himself into having pretend sex with a girl half his age (Flatley being between 59 and 60 at the time of filming, while Kelly was around 24 to 25), Flatley opts for a different sort of skeeziness — i.e. the route of pretentions to virtuousness. The transparently ego-driven urge to write his character into sharing a scene with a nude woman, whom he as director hired and paid an actress to perform, yet couching it within the trope of the wise older man gently rejecting the sexual advances of a younger woman infatuated with him, paternally putting her clothes back on her, and sending her on her way.
Flatley is basically pulling a Neil Breen with this bullshit, with Mary Louise Kelly’s Madeleine the equivalent of that girl in Fateful Findings who disrobes her towel in the bathroom in front of Breen, before he puts it back on her, sits her down on the edge of the bathtub, lectures her not to do it again, while the actress slowly turns and looks directly at the camera with prolonged eye contact, with a look that says: “I’m quitting acting forever so I never have to do a scene like this again.”
Kelly doesn’t do that in Blackbird (though it would’ve been hysterically funny if she did), as she’s a professional, and gives a pretty good performance throughout. Certainly doubly so when she’s around Flatley, out-acting him as easily as breathing. One can only hope she was financially compensated well enough to make her side boob worth sharing in this film of all places.
• The following line from Flatley is so hilariously terrible, from a writing and acting standpoint, that I had to rewind and replay it several times because of how much it made me laugh:
VICTOR: “Nick, stop it, don’t be ridiculous! We moved away to forget our past, not to fall right back into it! What don’t you understand about that?”
This is the greatest line of dialogue for Special Agent Michael Scarn that Steve Carell never delivered.
• Eric Roberts’ delivery of this line is incredible:
BLAKE: “We got the sea! We got booze! We got incredibly (muah!) sexy woOoOomennnn!”
That “muah!” was him blowing a kiss to a nameless bikini-clad woman walking past on his luxury yacht, by the way.
• Some great laptop acting from this South African dude that Eric Roberts is about to throw overboard. Neil Breen would be proud of the half-hearted fakeness of his typing!
(Also, for some mad reason, Roberts grabs his nuts before he kneels down behind the laptop guy to menacingly breathe down his neck. Was that the only way he could kneel, because his costume trousers were too tight, so he had to rearrange his crown jewels in order to avoid his nethers getting crushed? Or was it an Eric Roberts eccentric character choice? Hell if I know!)
• What a perfectly comedically timed neck breaking, with a great comedy stock sound effect to boot.
What’s that one comedy sketch with all the exaggeratedly easy neck-breaking?
No, not the Million Dollar Baby spoof in Scary Movie 4, it’s something else.
Well, after a little searching, I don’t know for sure if this is the one I was thinking of, but I found this Key & Peele sketch encapsulates the gag expertly, while in the process spoofing every cheesy action movie cliché that Flatley did in Blackbird with the utmost seriousness.
• In his close-ups during his conversation with Vivian as they walk along the beach, Flatley’s jutting his chin out with his mouth slightly agape as if he’s Marlon Brando in The Godfather, with a side order of Jack Nicholson Joker mouth. It’s giving Popeye, sans the spinach.
• Flatley’s friend, Nick (played by Ian Beattie), wearing that hat and suit, is making him give off major Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate vibes.
Even though they’re not 1:1 identical, there’s somehow still an unmistakable air of similarity.
• Eric, Mr. Roberts, please stop looking into the camera, you’re freaking me out, dude!
• Even though he’s not exactly trying very hard, Eric Roberts is still acting rings around everyone else in the film, what with his inherent charisma and acting talent. Though he never says no to any role he’s offered, meaning he’s often slumming it in rubbish movies like these (and so much worse) in between his more prestige stints getting occasionally hired by a Christopher Nolan or a Damien Chazelle, Roberts can’t help but be a commanding screen presence. And when he’s acting opposite Flatley’s flat performance, it’s nothing short of the “nuclear bomb vs. coughing baby” meme come to life.
• BLAKE: “Do you think I’m a bad guy? Or am I just…”
Wait, where’s the ending of the scene?
WHERE’S THE END OF THE SENTENCE?
WHY DID YOU CUT IT THERE, MICHAEL?!
• Flatley and Roberts finally face off over a game of poker, giving Flatley the chance to fully indulge in ripping off Casino Royale iconography.
• Check out this monologue from Flatley, delivered with an intensity that makes it sound like he wanted this to be his version of Liam Neeson’s famous “particular set of skills” monologue from Taken.
As you’d expect, it’s not even remotely close to the same level:
VICTOR: “Alright, then. Since you’re so keen on telling me what you can observe, you clearly wish to be seen as intelligent. Which would denote a rather narcissistic personality. Given that this game was by your invitation, I’d say you want to know more about me, and what I’m going to do about the current situation. Unfortunately for you, who I am is none of your concern, and what I do is out of your control.”
(A bit rich for Flatley to have himself speak a line accusing someone else of narcissism, given this film is nothing but an exercise in flagrant, unmitigated narcissism on his part.)
• This exchange would also have made for an appropriate quote to open this review with:
VICTOR: “I fold.”
BLAKE: “I really thought you’d bite.”
VICTOR: “Yeah, well, I have a habit of being disappointing.”
• Flatley really thought he was cooking with this line:
VICTOR: “I wonder what you love more: women… money… or playing god?”
• Called it! The “loyal soldier” dude has snuffed it!
(But as will soon become clear, Beattie’s character surprisingly doesn’t die, despite all foreshadowing to the contrary.)
• Flatley, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell you will ever convince a single soul on this planet that you would be a worthy opponent when engaging in a fistfight against a musclebound Black dude who’s twice as tall and thrice as jacked as you, let alone have us suspend our disbelief so stratospherically high that we’d ever believe you could kill said dude with a single knockout blow. You are not One Punch Man, Michael Flatley.
• Bless him, Flatley’s trying so hard to Act in his big emotional scene of him confessing to a priest, remembering the night his wife was burned to death by terrorists he failed to stop.
(In the flashback, the closeup on his face, lit by firelight, as he screams in what’s supposed to be horror, is disturbing. Not because he’s seeing his wife consumed by bad CGI flames, but because when Flatley’s brows are raised and his eyes are bugging out, he looks so creepy. It’s the kind of face you’d subliminally flash on screen to scare an audience, like Captain Howdy in The Exorcist.)
• Was Flatley’s drunken flashback montage really in need of an alternate take of the earlier nude scene, this time with a different camera angle that ensures you get a closer look at the one bare breast you only saw from a distance before? Guess they wanted to try and wake the audience up by any means necessary, like that scene in Open Water with the sudden full frontal nudity that was apparently implemented to keep audiences engaged with the film before the main plot kicked into gear. (I mean, yeah, sure, it’s a moderately effective tactic — just ask whoever it was that said “nudity is the cheapest special effect” (Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wyrnoski both have versions of that quote attributed to them) — but it doesn’t mean you can’t notice the mercenary motives fuelling it.)
• From the bits and pieces of muddled exposition sprinkled throughout the film for you to piece together who’s who and what’s what, I think the implied backstory of the heroes and villains is some vague mixture of James Bond-ian spy agencies, and John Wick-ian secret societies… which would also describe the Kingsmen franchise, but that’s not important right now. What matters is that Flatley clumsily name-drops all these organisations at inopportune times, mostly in the back half of the film (e.g. Blackley and his friends being part of a shadowy secret agent society called The Chieftains, while Molyneux’s part of another secret society called The Crusading Revolutionaries (jeez, what a mouthful; really rolls off the tongue)), and none of it has any weight or due importance. Most of the film is just Flatley faffing about on a Caribbean island like he’s doing an Adam Sandler vacation movie, and then the last half hour rushes to cram in all the plot stuff Flatley wasn’t as interested in, but which needs to be there to give reasons for his character to do and say badass action hero things, which is why he even made this film in the first place.
• Really, Flatley? You’re going to stage your swift dust-up with Eric Roberts’ goons off-screen, have it take place via some stock punch sound effects, then walk out with a few measly cuts, and some bloodstains on your shirt? Quoth Regina George: “Boo, you whore!”
• Nicole Evans deserved every penny of her paycheque for saying this line with a straight face, both on set and in her ADR sessions.
Reader, let me assure you, I am not shitting you with this. The following is a direct quote of a piece of dialogue written by Michael Flatley for this poor actress to perform:
VIVIAN: “You keep underestimating him! He’s the Blackbird, you fool!”
• So I guess Eric Roberts just… died? Off-screen? Completely unceremoniously? In the climactic gunfight we barely even got to see, before Flatley cut away from it?!
BOO-URNS TO YOU, SIR!!
• For the last time this movie:
MICHAEL FLATLEY! WOULD YOU PLEASE STRAIGHTEN YOUR STUPID JAUNTY HAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!
• Per the end credits, this film had two composers, and they still outsourced some of it to uncredited stock music from Audio Network.
Christ on a bicycle.
In conclusion:
If Blackbird never receives the How Did This Get Made? treatment, we will have forever failed as a species.
Paul Scheer will probably have some crazy family story from his past that he could relate to the film, June Diane Raphael will have thoughts about all those hats, and Jason Mantzoukas will lose his goddamn mind at all the Threat Level Midnight parallels that Flatley definitely didn’t intend, but just did wholly in earnest.
Because of that, Blackbird cements itself as a new classic for so-bad-it’s-good film connoisseurs to gaze upon in elatedly flabbergasted awe.
Originally published at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com
