Michael Collins

With Michael Collins, Neil Jordan is on the warpath with a new, sober political drama. The film gives a good overview of Irish history from the Easter Rising in 1916 to the killing of Michael Collins in 1922, after he had secured freedom for the greater part of Ireland.

Liam Neeson plays Michael Collins with authority and charisma. While the political tactician De Valera went to the USA to get the mighty nation to recognise an independent Ireland, Michael Collins, as minister of war, introduced a new and effective guerrilla tactic. His people were young men in civilian clothes who struck with lightning speed in assassinations of employees and traitors in the British administration.

Collins wears down the English, who agree to make a peace deal. Collins is sent off and achieves the most that could be achieved: an Irish state without the British province of Ulster, which must swear allegiance to the English throne. De Valera, who according to the film is aware that the solution Collins has pushed through is the best one could hope for, nevertheless makes Collins the scapegoat. Together with his delegates, De Valera refuses to sign the treaty despite a majority of the population. Civil war is a reality. Collins himself is lured into an ambush and murdered on his way to negotiations with De Valera. The film more than hints that De Valera had a hand in it.

The film is also about Collins' relationship with his good friend Harry Boland, who chooses De Valera's side when it comes to the crunch, and after the woman Kitty Kiernan, whom they were both courting, has given her heart to Collins.

Michael Collins is not markedly anti-British, for it actually shows that it was not the British who killed the Irish hero, but the Irish themselves.