Yes, I thought this movie was awful. I could not watch David Thewlis's antics, and noise, and vomiting (with a view of the toilet!) and so I could not get past the first five minutes of the movie. The girl was beautiful, but she kisses a man who just puked? Who is this movie for, anyway? He's supposed to be a newspaper writer? Drinking is his game and acting for the camera, the script, but not for any semiotics that reach out beyond the film production. Too stupid, too wretched, too unthinking, too unfeeling, too obnoxious, too disgusting, too many toos to go on with. I would really like to know what people saw in it, maybe I should have read some comments before watching it, but that's my problem.

A film involving a horrible murder, political intrigue and the IRA was not necessarily one I would have actively sought out for my viewing pleasure of a week-end, but this film is beyond taking the biscuit it is over the horizon with it and accelerating. This film is dark, witty and staring a hero would I wouldn't even consider sitting next to on a crowded bus, but David Thewliss made me end up caring for the self absorbed, ageing alcoholic and I found myself wanting him to pull one over on his slightly better dressed opposition also played with obvious enjoyment by Jason Isaacs and Robert Lyndsey. For me however the film was stolen by a foul mouthed taxi driver and a gun toting strip-a-nun who dominate the scenes they were in. This film is for anyone who has looked at life and seen to joke.

Having just viewed this film as part of my job, I can only say that I was getting paid to do it. It was mind blowingly painful to watch. For a supposed black comedey, it was utterly lacking in comedy, makming it more of a very poorly executed political thriller with badly-staged shoot-outs. The main character is utterly unlovable in every way, and you begin to wish that the IRA would just rub him out and save us the agony of having to put up with him. The rest of the cast go from unconvincing (A stripper nun) to stupidly pointless (A group od inept IRA hitmen) to one-dimensional (Our hero's long suffering wife who he trieats like crap and expects to be loved for it. Oh, the sotry? It doesn't show up till half way through the film, and then we're force-fed it by having one of the characters vomit expostion at the scrteen.The highlights? A see-through bra in the first ten-minutes.

I'm a big fan of Colin Bateman's books, and, although this isn't quite as good, I found it extremely entertaining nonetheless. Part of this is, however, undoubtedly because I'm from Northern Ireland and can relate to a lot of the character based humour (I thought the taxi driver was particularly authentic!) and Ulster in-jokes. Reading some of the other comments made here confirms what I expected- people from outside the province can't quite relate to it. To pick an analogy- I didn't find "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" as funny as Londoners would, and the same sort of thing applies here. Mind you, if you're not from Norn Iron you probably won't be annoyed by Robert Lindsay's dodgy accent, which was the biggest problem from my point of view.