Frequently parodied but rarely equaled, Robert De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me” monologue casts a menacing shadow across Brendan Muldowney’s fine vigilante themed feature. Dublin actor Darren Healy does remarkable work as a press photographer who, in the wake of a horrendous mugging, slowly loses his mind.
Obsessed with vengeance and increasingly paranoid, he withdraws from everything and everyone in favour of Tae Kwon Do lessons, knife shopping and skulking down alleyways.
Director Brendan Muldowney, a graduate of the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design meticulously works through every detail of this chilling thesis. The film’s careful naturalism grounds its potential for hysteria. But beneath the filmmaker’s gritty, terrifying portrait of Dublin lurks a genre movie that falls neatly into the ‘birth of an avenger’ genre.