Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Guy ROUTE IRISH is really angry and wants you to know all about it. Like all Ken Loach films it is about an oppressed Celt fighting the system. This time he's an ex-SAS and ex-PMC squaddie who refuses to accept the explanation offered by his former employers about how his best friend died in Iraq. After a cursory romance with his mate's gal, he quickly finds out that it's the corporate posh boys to blame again and so decides to go mental and take revenge. Although the trailers emphasise the action in Iraq, it's actually about the mental disintegration of an ex-soldier in Liverpool. Also, be warned that the Scouse accents are almost incomprehensible to non-Brits. Like most Loach films there's lots of excellent working class actors, gritty locations and a core of solid social drama. Sadly, like most Ken Loach films it is also absurdly partisan and preachy; his hero is almost schizophrenic in the way he switches from racial prejudice (soldiers as brutalised pawns of the elite) to loopy far- left ranting (which sounds like no soldier I've ever met) about the evils of the Iraq War. If Loach and his screenwriter Laverty could only get over their own prejudices then it would be a much better film.

tieman64 Ken Loach has made some powerful films, but many of his works are about worthy issues rather than being worthy art. He strongly resembles John Sayles in this respect. And like Sayles he demonstrates a concern for the working class, an interest in the fate of socialism, focuses on unions, general strikes, the physical and mental state of the working population and the formations and collapses of various political movements. He's tackled Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War, the suffocation of post war East Germany, the British general strikes of the 1920s, Britain's conflicts with Ireland, the Trotskyist movements of the 60s and early 70s and now with "Route Irish" the West's ongoing wars in the Middle East.Today Loach's films are mostly ignored or struggle to find distribution and/or financing. Back in the 60s, however, he was seen as a major force. His 1966 drama "Cathy Come Home", for example, is generally credited with making homelessness and unemployment a political issue in Britain, though Loach would go on to criticise the work: "It boils down to a structural problem within society," he said of Cathy. "Who owns the land? Who owns the building industry? How do we decide what we produce, where we produce it, under what conditions? You can't abstract housing from the economic pattern. So it is a political issue; the film just didn't examine it at that level." In an attempt to make more substantial works, Loach teamed up with Trotskyist playwright Jim Allen. Together the duo made a string of dramas ("The Big Flame", "The Rank and File", "Days of Hope" etc), most of which chartered the betrayals and defeats of the working class by Labour ministers and union heads. These films valorised workers and activists, and tended to posit reforms (and socialism itself) as being impossible because of "traitorous leadership". Loach's "Land and Freedom" would later say a similar thing; that the Soviet Union's collapse (and the downfall of the Spanish Revolution) lay not with socialism, but Stalinism.Loach then made a series of features ("Poor Cow", "Kes", "Family Life", "The Gamekeeper", "Looks and Smiles") which focused on a different dimension of working class life. Gone was class warfare, in was simple survival. These films are mostly tragedy's, Loach's characters beaten, battered, toiling, pushed into mental disorder or barely subsiding on state hand-outs. Audiences today may view these films as being ridiculously grim, but they need to be put into context. "They're the enemy in another guise," Loach wrote of British prime minister's Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher (their political parties, Labour and Conservative, both morphed into right or centre-right wing groups over the space of a decade), who supported the Vietnam War, dismantled unions, concocted anti-strike laws and began the deliberate creation of mass unemployment. The films try to shine a light on the underside of Thatcher's Britain, a form of budding neoliberalism which she described with the acronym TINA: "There Is No Alternative".As a response to the changes washing over Britiain, Loach turned to making documentaries in the 1980s ("I'd lost direction with regards to feature films"). These delved into everything from steel workers' strikes, factory closures, British Leyland, police violence, unemployment, media censorship/ownership, British Rail and the NHS. When television stations began censoring and threatening these docs, however, Loach returned to feature film-making. His films during this period tend to be defeatist fare like "Riff-Raff" and "Raining Stones", all about a kind of guerrilla warfare, in which the individual, the now defeated working class, resists capitalism by exploiting loopholes, liberties and state granted unemployment benefits. Resistance doesn't come to an end, it's just now individual rather than collective. Sticking your neck out has been replaced by ducking and diving, perhaps best seen in "Bread and Roses".Reinvigorated by the West's adventure's in the Middle East, Loach then made "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and "Route Irish", the former linking the bloody history of British Imperialism to present neo-colonial operations in Iraq, a link which the latter film makes explicit. In the mainstream media, both films were met with venom (mostly by papers owned by Rupert Murdoch). The education secretary of Britain damned Loach for "rubbishing his own country" and "glamourising the IRA". The Times demanded that Loach be committed and likened him to pro-Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The Telegraph deemed Loach "poisonous", though admitted that they didn't see the films ("I don't need to, anymore than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was"). Of course Loach has been making the same films for decades. It's just that now few are sympathetic to his politics.In any case, "Route Irish" tells the tale of Fergus, a former SAS member and later private contractor-mercenary in Iraq. The film's title refers to the US military's nickname for the stretch of highway connecting the International Zone in Baghdad with the city's airport ("the most dangerous road in the world"). The film is structured as a film noir, Fergus our noir hero who investigates the death of a friend and uncovers the evils of his government. But in a cyber-age of 24 hour news, nothing Fergus discovers surprises us. We're smarter than artist, film and hero, a fact which makes "Route Irish" a dull affair. Loach is right to draw attention to covered up war crimes committed against Iraqis (often by contractors exempt from both international and Iraqi law), and is right to explain how thoroughly war has been privatised (there were around 160,000 foreign contractors in Iraq at the height of the occupation)...but the problem is that we know this and more. Outrage has long morphed into self-reflexive impotency, and Loach's neorealism, which once seemed urgent, now seems limited.6/10 – "In the Valley of Elah" meets "Silver City" meets "Green Zone". Worth one viewing.

lurpak Just adding my balance to the reviews here. The acting does stand out as being particularly off in points, as you can see some of the actors eyes searching in the back of their heads trying to remember their lines as though they had received the script that morning. The story was hard to follow and unconvincing as a reason for a conspiracy. On the plus side, it did have potential, however potential is not any use to a finished product. I have to agree with another reviewer who suggested that Hollywood would have done a better job of it...and THAT really pains me to say as I do love British films mainly for that exact reason that we tend to make more subtle realistic action which makes it more believable and therefore more thrilling by its realism instead of impossible stunts (read Mission Impossible and anything by jon woo)

yuwei-lin This anti-war film, if I may classify it in that way, presents a perspective that is very different from any existing anti-war films produced by Hollywood. It shows that: no heroes in this film; no sound solution to resolve the injustice in the system; the expert fighter trained and produced by the war system can fight back, but resulted in double/triple tragedy. The investigation of Frankie's death did not start by an American Senator; instead, it was doubted by the death's best friend, a lad who's also been a soldier. The protagonist had / tried to have sex with the death's wife, but it wasn't straightforward (because he was trained to be a fighter). Apart from one conclusion, the film blurs the line of justice and injustice in the war system. That unquestionable conclusion is that: the war on Iraq is inhumane and contractors are unnecessary evils.