Crush Proof
UK/Netherlands/Ireland 1998
Reviewed by Kevin Maher
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A housing estate on the outskirts of Dublin, the present day. After he is released from prison, teenager Neal visits his girlfriend Aisling to see his son. Aisling refuses to let him in and calls the police. After fleeing, Neal reunites with his best friend Liam and other members of his old gang. Riding on horseback, they go to a rave on the city's outskirts where they meet Neal's old ecstasy-dealing partner Deco. Neal chases Deco and ties him up in the middle of the road, claiming that Deco informed on him to the police. A speeding truck suddenly appears and Deco is killed.
The gang abscond on horseback. Liam meets Neal's half-sister Nuala who rapes him at gunpoint. The police round up the gang's horses and take them to the pound. Neal visits his little sister Suki but leaves when he receives a hostile reception from his mother and her new girlfriend. With Nuala in tow, Neal and his gang steal their horses back from the pound and head for the mountains. One of them, Luke, is hit by a car and killed.
That night, after a drunken argument, Neal rapes Nuala and the gang splits up, leaving Neal alone with his friend Sean. The police find them and shoot Sean, but Neal escapes. He meets up with Liam and Nuala; she knocks both boys out with a rock and leaves them unconscious on the ground.
Review
Written by a Californian, produced by a Dutchman, directed by a Scotsman and set in a Dublin housing estate, Crush Proof strains desperately to stay in a political vacuum. In both the publicity material and in the film itself director Paul Tickell is careful to stress his tale's "universal" and "mythic" qualities over the socio-political environment that surrounds the story. For protagonists, we have a contrived and cinematically generic street gang, straight out of Rumblefish or The Wild One (1953), prowling an emphatically Irish cityscape. So many scenes are visually arresting and rich with metaphors for contemporary Ireland, yet Tickell stumbles blindly on with familiar and formulaic gangland histrionics.
The movie opens with establishing shots of Dublin's Four Courts, General Post Office and Phoenix Park, each location a giant exclamation mark in the history of Irish national identity. It then cuts straight away into an anonymous prison interior where anti-hero Neal is serving his last hours. The Godardian style with which the scene is shot - entirely in jagged jump-cut close-ups - takes it blatantly out of its context, a paradox that is quickly established and continues throughout the film. Tricolours cover the walls of the housing estates where residents happily riot at the slightest provocation, yet each time we cut to Neal's ensemble they're preoccupied with the usual clichéd activities - leadership fights, running from the law and getting drunk - seemingly living in a different movie altogether.
Unlike in Larry Clark's kids or Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (and the latter is clearly Tickell's touchstone), Crush Proof's sense of social realism is undercut by a leaden and essentially banal script, shamefully bereft of local parlance and indigenous speech patterns. Here painter-turned-scriptwriter James Mathers has crafted dialogue that generally runs the gamut from, "My head's bleedin' wrecked!" to "I fuckin' hate techno!", lines that fall with mechanical regularity from the mouths of the adolescent cast. Meanwhile, the movie's women, all lipgloss and negligées, seem to have come straight out of a particularly bad soft-porn film. Neal's half-sister Nuala 'forces' one of the gang to have sex with her and later 'provokes' Neal into raping her, while Neal's mother and her lesbian lover indulge in a kitchen romp that is 'accidentally' interrupted by the police. Equally artificial is the dogged Detective Sergeant Hogan who, like so many movie cops, builds up an aggressive rapport with Neal through their sporadic phone conversations.
The direction from one-time journalist and BBC Arena alumni Tickell is enthusiastic and non-classical, although self-conscious formal strategies can't smooth over a certain sloppiness: one chase starts indoors at night and continues outside in daylight. In broader terms, the movie is heavily indebted to Joe Comerford's Traveller (1981). Both films examine a culturally disenfranchised part of Irish society and in the process break with received stylistic conventions. Yet while Comerford's travellers are spiritually akin to Crush Proof's "pony kids", Comerford's movie is a slow and thoughtful meditation on the travellers' place in Irish society. Tickell's film, by contrast, offers little more than an uninformed chaotic mess. Similar themes of urban disintegration have been given greater testimony in any number of recent European films, from Bertrand Tavernier's L.627 to Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher. What we have with Crush Proof is neither universal storytelling nor a provocative social document, but a movie that treads an anonymous middle-ground between these archetypes.
Credits
- Producer
- Kees Kasander
- Screenplay
- James Mathers
- From an original story/screenplay by
- John Edwards
- James Mathers
- Director of Photography
- Reinier van Brummelen
- Editors
- Catherine Creed
- Chris Wyatt
- Production Designer
- Tom Conroy
- Music
- Attie Bauw
- Alen Svetopetric
- Aleksandar Radojcic
- ©Woodline Productions Limited, Movie Masters BV, Liquid Films Limited and Continent Film GmbH
- Production Companies
- Woodline Productions/Movie Masters/Liquid Films/Continent Film present a Kees Kasander productionProduced with the participation of The European Co-production Fund (U.K.) with the assistance of Bord Scannán na hÉireann/The Irish Film Board in association with Vara and the CoBO Fund
- Produced with the support of investment incentives for the Irish Film Industry by the Government of Ireland
- Executive Producers
- Terry Glinwood
- Bob Hubar
- Denis Wigman
- Bord Scannán na hÉireann:
- Rod Stoneman
- Co-producers
- Nicholas O'Neill
- Michael Pakleppa
- Associate Producer
- Sophie Fiennes
- Production Co-ordinator
- Emma Scott
- Production Manager
- Margaret Jennings
- Location Manager
- Kieran Hennessey
- Post-production Supervisor
- Mike Saxton
- Assistant Directors
- Robert Quinn
- Hannah Quinn
- Lisa McLaughlin
- Script Supervisor
- Kathleen Weir
- Casting Director
- Maureen Hughes
- Dialogue Adviser
- Vinny Murphy
- Camera Operator
- Benito Strangio
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Maurice Foley
- Construction:
- Stephen Meaney
- Art Director
- John Hand
- Set Dresser
- Martin Goulding
- Costume Designer
- Marie Tierney
- Costume Supervisor
- Helen Kane
- Make-up Designer
- Rosie Blackmore
- Hair Designer
- Conor McAlistair
- Title Design
- Chris Allies
- Opticals
- Cine Image
- Additional Score
- Otto van den Toorn
- Music Performers
- Triple A
- Attie Bauw
- Alen Svetopetric
- Aleksandar Radojcic
- Trumpet Player
- Huub Habets
- Music Production
- Attie Bauw
- Music Editor
- James Feltham
- Soundtrack
- "Friends" by T. Reid, performed by Triple A & Juliet Carion; "Nowhere" by Juliet Carion, performed by Triple A & Juliet Carion; "As the Bubble Expands", "Canola" by Jochem Papp, performed by Speedy J; "Sky Pilot" by V.H. Brigga, Eric Burdon, performed by Eric Burdon and the Animals; "Purple Heart" by T-Bone Burnett & Bono; "PunkyWhiteNoiseThing", "Long Shadows" by Simon Shackleton, Howard Saunders, performed by Lunatic Calm; "Darkness, Darkness" by Jesse Colin Young, performed by The Youngbloods
- Production Sound
- Dan Birch
- Dubbing Mixers
- Nigel Heath
- Julian Slater
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Nick Adams
- Sound Editor
- Sam Southwick
- Dialogue Editor
- Gordon Brown
- Foley
- Editor:
- Paul Wrightson
- Horse Master
- Philippe Zone
- Horse Handlers
- Norman Evans
- William Evans
- Tom Evans
- Norrie Magee
- Sam Kennedy
- Robin Quinn
- Lavinia Jobson
- Howard Woods
- Alan Woods
- Jackie Woods
- Liam Byrne
- Zoe Blackmore
- Raven Handler
- Louise Cullen
- Cast
- Darren Healy
- Neal
- Viviana Verveen
- Nuala
- Jeff O'Toole
- Liam
- Mark Dunne
- Sean
- Michael McElhatton
- Detective Sergeant Hogan
- Lisa Fleming
- Suki
- Mary Murray
- Red Andi
- Fiona Glascott
- Aisling
- Charlotte Bradley
- the ma
- Stuart Dunne
- the da
- Gavin Kelty
- Deco
- John Conroy
- Black Andy
- Gerard Kearney
- Kevin
- Anton Stafford
- Luke
- Christopher Fitzpatrick
- Gary
- Pat McGrath
- Kevin's da
- Eithne McGinness
- woman in chipper
- Gerard Byrne
- priest
- Angela Harding
- Deco's ma
- Kathrina Shine
- Ciara
- Frank Coughlan
- village barman
- Paddy Foy
- Det Sergeant Hogan's sidekick
- Pat Ainscough
- detective in garda station
- Fran Brennan
- Eric Hurley
- prison officers
- Robert Healy
- D.S.P.C.A. officer
- Darren Harold
- little boy at horsegathering
- Gerry Murphy
- little boy's da
- Dirk Nijland
- garda outside chipper
- A.J. Kennedy
- yuppie on mobile
- Certificate
- tbc
- Distributor
- Clarence Pictures
- tbc feet
- tbc minutes
- Dolby
- In Colour