Another mob movie based in new york..very few have succeeded at it. This one bites more than it can chew, and gets choked in the middle and dies. The narration starts like it is the history of the gangs of NY-with the civil war,and ends in the 90s..and thats where the story begins. Seriously??!What are we supposed to expect...?! Never has a movie aspired to be so much and delivered so little. The movie is lost from the start - its got too many characters, too many settings,everybody has an angle on everything...it all adds up to nothing in the end. Five guys were hustlers from when they were 10, but now do not have access to a handgun?! Therefore Dennis got to steal a canoe to pay for one? As I said, it doesn't add up. The side stories make no sense - Frankie's sister(the elongated wedding was unncessary),then Helen who does a about face in a cab,the union scenes(where was that going?!),the hundreds of thousands of bars that they hang out in(I know they all gotta be cool like that)...feels like this movie wants to tell the entire new york irish mob story in less two hours - and it fails. Nothing happens until a predictable end(howz that for a story line?). Save your time, and watch one of the Godfather movies for the 456th time and you have your time spent meaningfully

The Irish in Hell's Kitchen, New York, maybe but rather in Satan's brine of a brain. Five kids swear to be friends forever but they want to get the moon without working their backside too hard. So they do small mediocre little deals under the complacent and tolerant eyes of the local Irish gang-leader and the local Irish police inspector. What happens is the natural consequence of that mediocrity. One of the five will one day dream big and go to the gang-leader who will see him as a competitor, so the gang-leader will trick him into a complete funky flunk and one will be killed by another, and a third one will commit suicide and a fourth one will have to have a bloody fight with the gang-leader under the protective eye of the cop for the cop finally to clean up the place in the most ineffective way possible: by terminating the gangster with a good old police bullet. And the other tricked one will finally pass justice over himself and jump from the roof. One will survive happily married and the other one will escape with the sister of the first one who got killed. More melodramatic you die. Sickening by excess. This vision of Irish crime or Irish police work or even Irish love does not compare with the nearly mundane bel canto of the mafia, or the rustic gory pitiless vociferations of the Russian or the Georgian mafias, or even the sly treacherous vicious praying mills of those who lock themselves in some kind of exclusive religion, no matter which, Christians Born Again or Islamic Fundamentalism or yoga transcendentalism. The film in other words sounds pretty critical of the Irish, if not plainly racist towards them: they are not even able to be good gangsters exploiting their brothers and sisters.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Yes, the cast and the movie are damn good. I just watched it a few days ago, not expecting much, but I was pretty surprised. Interesting engrossing story, great acting, this is a little cheaply made but well directed and superbly played sleeper, it will get its followers.NOT as good as STATE OF GRACE, but also not that much worse.Recently I saw for example the re-make of ASSAULT ON PRECINT 13, which is utterly awful, as worse as it can get.Compared to junk like this ONE EYED KING is a real treat, something to look out for and certainly enjoy.I even found it better - because of being more realistic - than the high-speed Marin Scorsese junk "THE DEPARTED", which won Oscars for delivering hardly anything.Nice little gem, this ONE EYED KING !

Not even worth the price of a rental. This movie stunk, from the acting to the cinematography. I rented this hoping that if was a fraction as good as Goodfellows, it might be worth watching; especially since there aren't many good movies about the Irish mafia.The narrator started off by stating how notoriously mean these "Westies" were, but they certainly were not anything special in this movie. Yeah, a couple of action scenes with cliché tough talk, but mostly just bad dialog and dancing, riddled with a few fist fights with too much fake blood. Watching William Baldwin try to "act" the tough guy is like watching Lisa Lampanelli act sexy (no offense to Lisa!). Baldwin was just horrible, as was Jim Breuer(Half Baked), was that supposed to be a joke? I could go on, but it would just be waste of time.I give it a 2/10, just because there are some movies that are worse.