Blackbird movie review: Michael “Riverdance” Flatley flatfoots his way into filmmaking

Long rumored — or perhaps “long threatened” is more accurate — and finally here: Michael “Riverdance” Flatley’s Blackbird has landed in UK and Irish cinemas.

Sometimes it’s really tough to pin down who is responsible for a movie so inept that your mind boggles at the state of it. A competent director can be failed by mediocre actors. Wonderful actors can be failed by a terrible script. A great script can be failed by everyone. Filmmaking is a team sport, a film the culmination of the efforts of so many people with very different jobs and so many moving parts that must work well in concert that often who is to blame when it completely and utterly fails to gel is difficult to say.

Not so with Flatley’s pabulum opus. This is all on him: he wrote it, directed it, produced it, financed it himself from his prodigious fortune, and stars in it. It’s awful: sometimes hilariously so, and sometimes it’s just plain baffling. It’s the sort of awful that comes about when a raging egomaniac is surrounded by yes men and women who daren’t tell him he’s proudly strolling down the street naked.

How else to explain how Flatley’s *snort* ex-MI6 agent Victor Blackley was both the absolute best at what he once did — what exactly he did and what precisely made him so good is murky; just take the movie’s word for it, I guess — and yet he also apparently overlooks the fact that the fancy-pants Barbados hotel he now runs, The Blue Moon, is a “a safe haven for international criminals to complete under the table dealings”? I mean, sure, in a well-written movie — like, perhaps, Casablanca, which Flatley seems to believe he is, in part, invoking, with him as Bogey, of course — that sort of contradiction could be a powerful way to sketch a man’s disillusionment with not only his former job but the world at large.

But this is not a well-written movie. This is a James Bond–esque fantasy in which Flatley has cast himself as a figure of such irresistible mystery and power that beautiful women young enough to be his granddaughter are literally throwing themselves half-naked at him. (He responds with noble refusal, of course.) It’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie, if unintentionally. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to learn that Flatley has never seen a genuine spy movie, only p0rn parodies of them.

This is so poorly written a movie that nothing in it actually indicates that The Blue Moon is meant to be any sort of safe haven for anyone looking for anything more than a mai tai and an afternoon massage after a dip in the sea; that description comes in the press materials. But something nefarious is clearly meant to be going on here: Among the hotel employees are people who still work for MI6, who clandestinely phone London for background checks on guests and compile dossiers on them, etc, even though Blackley — aka the Blackbird, natch; this nickname goes totally explained — absolutely refuses to have anything to do with his old life. So either The Blue Moon is emphatically not a safe haven for bad guys — surely someone will have noticed that doing a deal under the table at The Blue Moon soon after results in arrest or sudden violent death — or else MI6 has had people working undercover for a full decade with nothing to show for it in order to be in place when Blake Molyneux (Eric Roberts: The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence), Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs), international man of wealth and villainy, shows up and suddenly Blackley is persuaded to get back on the job.

My brain hurts, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the WTFery of Blackbird.

I mentioned that Flatley is an egomaniac. He cast himself as a miracle-performing savior-god in his Lord of the Dance spectacular, the stepped-up (ha!) Irish step-dance show he developed when the Riverdance people booted him for being so insufferable. Here, his tenure at MI6 involved him being a member of an elite group of agents known as the Chieftains. As in the legendary traditional Irish folk band the Chieftains. As in the legendary traditional Irish folk band the Chieftains that Flatley once toured with as a dancer, and who turned him down when he requested to become a full-time member. Flatley scores points — or thinks he does — like the least imaginative playground bully you encountered in third grade.

Oh, but I got sidetracked. The plot here thickens because who turns up with Molyneux but Vivian (Nicole Evans: Captain America: The First Avenger), formerly one of the Chieftains (the spies, not the band), who doesn’t realize that she is engaged to a spectacularly over-the-top asshole global supervillain. (Elite. She was an elite secret agent. The Queen is gonna need God to save her at this rate.) She is also an old flame of Victor’s, someone he’s been in love with forever even while he has also been wallowing in torment for ten years over the fiancée who was killed because of his work. (Flatley’s lack of imagination gets a workout in the script, too.) You can tell Victor is suffering mightily via Flatley’s facial expressions, which range from “slightly constipated” to “wondering if that smell is dog shit on his shoe” to “did I leave the gas on?” The succession of hats he wears at jaunty angles — even at his fiancée’s funeral! — have more personality and screen presence than he does.

Flatley won Best Actor for his performance here at the Monaco Streaming Film Festival last year, even though this is not a streaming film, and even though he cannot act.

To be fair, this movie — which exists only because an incredibly wealthy man has money to burn — is good for one thing: It’s an excellent argument for punitive taxation of the rich. Milk these fuckers so they don’t have stupid millions to spend on their vanity garbage. Because God help us if Blackbird gives Elon Musk any ideas.

more films like this:
• Spy [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Disney+ UK]
• Skyfall [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix US]