Salt Lake Tribune Review

There may be peace in Northern Ireland, but reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics may not be easy to achieve -- and those lingering tensions are captured with ferocity and grace in the drama "Five Minutes of Heaven."

"For me to talk about the man I have become, you need to know about the man I was," begins Alistair Little (played by Liam Neeson). We meet Alistair as a 16-year-old (played by Mark Davidson) in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, in 1975. He's a member of the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, and he's got an order to kill a Catholic, Jim Griffin (Gerard Jordan). We see this crime play out in the movie's first half-hour, culminating in young Alistair shooting Jim in the head -- while Jim's 11-year-old brother, Joe (Kevin O'Neill), watches.

The movie moves out of flashback to find Alistair and Joe (played by James Nesbitt) today. They are both riding in town cars, being brought together for a TV news special about reconciliation. Alistair, having served 12 years in prison for killing Jim, now counsels prisoners on conflict resolution. Joe works in an egg-carton factory in Lurgan, still seething over Jim's murder and how his family blamed Joe for not stopping it.

As the two men arrive, Alistair tells the TV crew that "[Joe's] anger could go in any direction." Meanwhile, Joe prepares for the encounter with a knife in his pocket. Joe confides in Vika (Anamaria Marinca, from "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"), a friendly production runner, about his plans for revenge -- and his desire for the "five minutes of heaven" he'll enjoy watching Alistair die.

Screenwriter Guy Hibbert (who co-wrote "Omagh," which captured the tragedy of a 1998 IRA bombing) extensively interviewed the real Alistair Little and Joe Griffin and distilled their complex emotions -- guilt and grief, sorrow and anger -- into a precisely written script. German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, shooting in confined spaces (the town cars, the
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green rooms of the TV shoot), captures the same tense claustrophobia that he brought to his Adolf Hitler drama "Downfall" and his medical thriller "Das Experiment." (Hirschbiegel and Hibbert won jury awards at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival for their work.)

But the power of "Five Minutes of Heaven" comes from the paired performances by Neeson and Nesbitt. Each man works solo for much of the movie (whether they meet becomes a key point in the plot), each holding the audience spellbound when he's onscreen.

-- Sean P. Means

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