3 out of 5

Director: Neil Jordan

The Butcher Boy is 1. A typical partially cerebral partially silly journey from Neil Jordan 2. Deathly impenetrable in terms of understanding the heavy Irish accents 3. Shocking 4. Strange 5. Funny 6. Worth seeing (as summarized in point 1). Neil Jordan has worked in several genres but he loves the slightly wonky point-of-view of an ungrounded narrator, and here he gets to throw that joyously against the screen with Francie Brady, played AMAZINGLY by Eamonn Owens (and surely credit here to Jordan as well for getting this strange performance from a young actor). The Butcher Boy is essentially the tale of a kid gone crazy, a hyperactive youth fed on candy and black-and-white sci fi who is driven from reality by a drunken father and suicidal mother and tons of misfortune. Something that works very well in the book – Francie’s rambling narrative that slides in and out of what’s happening and what’s going on in his brain – is attemptedly translated direct to screen here, and Jordan seemed to want to keep the language thick to enhance the oddity of everything, but it ends up making the film harder to really get wrapped up in. Also at odds is Jordan’s sense of dark comedy – he nails Francie’s personality and interactions with adults but when trying to give us a more sober look at his developing insanity the movie doesn’t quite get the point across – as much as it does when dealing with the more grounded dramas of friendship and criminal acts. The minor changes from book to screen to make it more palatable shouldn’t bother readers, but The Butcher Boy – a challenge to bring to screen – ends up being more effective in text, the film version feeling wandering rather than tumultuous