Stephen Rea plays Eddie, a street trader working on the patch of the obnoxious ruling Irish clan headed by Richard Harris and Brendan Gleeson. The main premise of the story concerns the wedding of Harris to a local teenager, who promptly runs away after the ceremony with Eddie's young assistant and a trunk of money. Rea is dispatched to find them and bring the girl back.Several memorable features light up this unusual movie – the performance of Aislin McGuckin as the bought and sold bride, the music at the wedding (excellent use of traditional Irish songs), the way that Rea and Harris play off each other, and the truly shocking bit where an expected bit of violence intrudes. The ending is really funny but I wouldn't dream of spoiling it!

With such a good cast, it is disconcerting to see the film not quite succeed. Part of the fault lies with the writing, that misses many chances for character development, and simply abandons any pretence of creating a female role. But more subtle is the failure of tone and timing; in both respects the flaws are inherited from TV work. Tarkovsky speaks of film being about time, and this piece is a study in how a casual and episodic realism that grapples with time neither in structure nor in scene can cause a work to drift away from its purpose, and art.There is, again from television, an ambiguity of intent: the script writer sees a chance to draw a character of some violence; then glimpses the possibility of pathos. In the end we all suffer from a retreat, in which sitcom is next in line.