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Anticipating London's resurgence by many years, on the morning of the Good Friday in question, Harold is locking up a massive real estate deal for a stretch of old docklands property that could turn hugely profitable several years hence when (he's convinced) the city will use the land to build a stadium for the 1988 Olympics. The investors are being wined and dined on Harold's yacht, touring up the Thames, while he pays special attention to a couple of Americans with deep pockets, last names likely ending in vowels, and a desire for quiet, profitable investments. The whole thing threatens to fall apart when a series of attacks on Harold's enterprises shatter a peaceful day of deal-making. Bombs take out the man in charge of driving Harold's mum to church as well as one of Harold's pubs and one of his right-hand men goes cruising for male companionship but gets stabbed to death by a very young Pierce Brosnan.
Giving The Long Good Friday some juice is the fact that the majority of the film is not about Harold taking revenge, it's instead him flailing about trying to figure out where the attack is coming from. Having ruled the city for so long, Harold has no enemies of consequence left alive. Any operators worth a damn are doing so well in business with him that they'd be suicidal to try anything - which doesn't stop Harold from rounding them all up and, in one of the film's most memorable scenes, hanging them all upside down from meathooks in an abattoir while venting his spleen. Even though viewers were privy to a long and dreamy sequence at the film's opening in which guns were brandished and suitcases of money exchanged hands, we are just about as in the dark as Harold is.
As long as it keeps up the mystery, the film sustains interest. This is due in no little part to Hoskins, just entering his film career after a decade of TV work but already in possession of an authoritative presence that was impossible to ignore. Complementing him quite nicely is Helen Mirren in an underwritten role as Harold's bourgeois girlfriend; their salty rapport is quite the best thing about The Long Good Friday. This is Hoskins' film, no two ways about it, his awesome mixture of smarts, thugishness and split-second vulnerability are some of the best work he's ever done. But the thrilling mystery of the film's early stretches dissipates when Harold's adversaries become clear. This leaves us with a needlessly convoluted revenge plot and gives one more time to notice the film's flatly lit non-aesthetic and headache-inducing score, which sounds like Tangerine Dream on a tequila bender. It's almost enough to make you pine for Guy Ritchie.
The new DVD from Anchor Bay includes a making-of featurette, commentary from director John Mackenzie, interviews with Hoskins and Brosnan, and a cockney slang glossary.
Long swim back home, too.
