This film worked quite well as a comedy, with a notorious criminal making fools out of the Gardai. As such, I would have given it 7 or 8 out of 10. Kevin Spacey is always worth watching, as is David Kelly, who had a cameo role as the priest. However I have a couple of reservations.Firstly, you can only go so far with comedies on this subject: so you have to ignore the torture and violence scenes. You could have done an "A-Team" where nobody gets hurt, but since this is loosely based on a real life criminal, that would have been hypocritical.Secondly, I have never in my entire born days heard such appalling Dublin accents. I had to laugh when I discovered that the dialogue coach was called Brendan Gunn - he should have been fired instead of all the other guns that were fired on screen. Spacey's accent never got past Rockall. And he was far from being alone in this respect. Casting directors should know better.Dublin accents (north or south of the Liffey) are not easy, even for Cork or Belfast people, but for good examples of it being done well, see Kate Hudson in "About Adam".However I have to admit that I did quite enjoy the film.Finally for examples of accents bad enough to spoil films, try Michael Caine in Hurry Sundown and Sean Connery in The Molly Maguires or anything else for that matter. Except that Connery always gets away with it.

Go see the The General, the story this movie is based on. The General is much better and acted. The ending not plausible in this film plus Kevin's accident annoying. I know they changed the names of the real people giving them "license" to mess with the facts but this is still the story of The General, a criminal who gave no second thought to murder and torture. I can't believe anyone would want to try and imply this man was noble. I found Kevin's accent distracting. He is a good mimic but keeping the Dublin accent going for an entire film was more than he could handle. One positive about the film, Kevin was impressed with the work of a mainly unknown actor named Colin Farrell and helped spread the word around the U.S. film community about him.

I'm pretty sure that this movie is a public service message begging all criminals in the world to move to Ireland. According to the movie, the police in Dublin are by far the stupidest people to be found outside of an Anna Nicole Smith fan club.Micheal Lynch (Kevin Spacey) is the title ordinary decent criminal. He plans and commits lots of robberies, breaks his associates' hands, and has people killed, but you're supposed to like him because, well, he's played by Kevin Spacey and it is inhuman not to sympathize with any character played by Spacey (except maybe in Se7en, but c'mon, you thought the fat guy had it coming, too). Further, he doesn't seem to be a Mormon, but he seemingly has two wives, Christine (Linda Fiorentino) and Lisa (Helen Baxendale). He commits lots of crimes, which drives the unbelievably inept police crazy, goes up against the IRA, which really pisses them off, and steals a priceless painting (well, not so priceless, the value is repeatedly quoted as 30,000,000 of some odd money measurement), which nobody really seems to care too much about.I could go into great detail about this movie, but it's really not worth my time. The acting is not bad, the directing is adequate, but the script has plot holes that you could drive space shuttles through. The police repeatedly fall for the "it's not me, but someone with my build and height wearing a mask" trick throughout the movie. At the end, when they believe they've killed Lynch, the police just assume that the unidentifiable body is his. Don't they have dental records in Ireland? Can't anybody at least check his blood type? Obviously, no. They just assume that everything is resolved. They could drastically improve their competency if they hired a team of third graders to point out the obvious idiocies they commit.This was the longest 94 minute movie I've ever seen.

Who doesn't like witty, lovable criminals, who out wit every copper and other rival criminals in a heartbeat? That's a crime movie genre, which actually appeals to me: smart dialogs, funny action and so on.So, in "Ordinary Decent Criminal" we have one of the greatest living actors, Kevin Spacey, who is playing Irish mobster named Michael Lynch, and he's just such a fellow I described. There's also Colin Farrell in a small role as one of the thugs in Michael's gang. Actually rather good acting all around from all of the actors and that's the only reason this movie stays afloat, because the script is not that funny as it tries to be.Sure, it has couple of good laughs in it, but most of the jokes feel little forced.Direction is pretty decent, not worst thing ever directed, but certainly not the greatest crime movie either.Good for couple of laughs.