Life is a cascade of disappointments. We are forever travelling hopefully to find the hotel half-built and the beach soaked in raw sewage. When news emerged that Michael Flatley’s Blackbird — the most discussed home movie since the Zapruder tape — was finally to receive a theatrical release, there was much dancing on tables and parping of party blowers. Yet there were also murmurs of unease. The real thing could surely never live down to the Platonic ideal we had been honing since its completion in 2018. Right?
Well, as with most supposedly camp accidental entertainments, Blackbird is almost as boring as it is hilarious. That noted, it is often very funny indeed. The trailer suggested the sort of film a nine-year-old might dream up in 1972 if gifted the world’s most extravagant dressing-up box and permitted access to a small nation’s arsenal. I wanna fire two guns at the same time. I wanna pretty lady in a nice dress. I wanna wear a grown-up dinner jacket.
That’s not quite what we get. The biggest surprise is that Blackbird is not really an action film at all. More yellow-pack Casablanca than fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry 007, the film begins with retired superagent Victor Blackley — codename Blackbird — burying his wife in front of a huge Irish mansion. We then flash-forward 10 years to find our hero running an exclusive resort in the Caribbean. Things turn peculiar when somebody who is not Paul Henreid (the reliably straight-to-video Eric Roberts) turns up with an old flame who is not Ingrid Bergman (a person named Nicola Evans).
Blackbird, torn up by guilt over the death of his wife, has vowed to abjure conflict, but, learning that his old squeeze’s new beau is a stratospherically evil arms dealer, he eventually shifts into graceless action. “Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” he tells a friendly priest. “And I am about to sin again!” I’m taking the suggestions of Graham Greene as entirely accidental. That resolution comes in the last 10 minutes. To that point the film has been concerned largely with characters scowling at one another over coloured drinks while the band covers predictable jazz standards.
The hat action is something else. Blackbird is rarely seen without the sort of sub-fedora titfer that deluded men pull on when the eldest child has left for college
It is important to clarify that Blackbird, during which a Chicagoan dancer saves the world while evading the amorous advances of younger women, is not a vanity project. “I didn’t finance it because I wanted to make a vanity project,” Flatley told the Hollywood Reporter. Gotcha. Still, the writer-director (one M Flatley) has set things up kindly for his lead actor. “You’re looking very handsome,” the young torch-singer murmurs as he strains to remain within his form-fitting dinner jacket. Later, he gallantly turns her down when she arrives in his bedroom and exposes sufficiently little flesh to retain a 15A cert.
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The costuming here is peculiar. Everything Roberts wears seems a size too large. Is that an evil thing? Flatley strolls about in what looks like the best from the exclusive Okay, Boomer! luxury line. The hat action, in particular, is something else. Blackbird is rarely seen without the sort of sub-fedora titfer that deluded men pull on when the eldest child has left for college. Flatley adds his own twist by — even at a funeral — inclining his into a Bob Fosse tilt, thus suggesting the imminent arrival of a chorus line. The biggest laugh at the press show comes when, after helping out with the loading of crates — Why? He’s the boss — Blackley turns to an underling who swaps the great man’s cap for yet another brimmed Bogart aper. An absolute hoot.
The female characters are regrettably dim. The black characters are disappointingly disposable. It implies no negative criticism to relate that Patrick Bergin, often seen in a red British telephone booth, is literally phoning in much of his supporting role. For no good narrative reason, Flatley inserts one of the dumbest poker scenes in cinema history. It says nothing about your character if he wins because he draws a rarely encountered, unbeatable hand.
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So, yes, Blackbird is just about as poor as we had hoped. It may even be bad enough to bear ironic recommendation. But there remains something quaint about Flatley’s decision to fork out so much for an entertainment — professionally shot and edited, to be fair — so rooted in enthusiasms from another era. It could have been even worse (better?). He could have danced the baddies to death while lasers blasted from his Cuban heels. Maybe in the sequel.
