Five Minutes tells the story of Alistair Little (Liam Neeson) who, at the age of 17, assassinated a young Catholic in the name of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a paramilitary Protestant group who fought against the IRA. As he steps away from the scene, he catches the gaze of his victim's younger brother Joe Griffin before he heads off to celebrate with a beer and some girls at the local dancehall. Decades later, Joe (James Nesbitt) works at an egg-crate company while Alistair tours the world as a messenger of peace, recanting his violent, misspent youth for gathered crowds and heads of state. In an ironic if not self-reflexive conceptual turn, a producer decides that putting the two men together, in the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation, would be ratings gold. A bitter send-up of TV politics, the show goes bust when the producers and crew try to direct Joe, leading Alistair to attempt a peaceful solution on his own terms.
These terms include a knock-down-drag-out brawl in an abandoned tenement that is apparently supposed to be a final act of catharsis, as Joe forgives the man only a few scenes later. It's also an odd moment seeing as Hirschbiegel, the director behind Downfall, spends much of his film playing on the seething tension between a bloodthirsty Joe and a melancholic Alistair. The tone of the film in its second half works to completely diffuse the power that it initially builds by searching and -- by the movie's finale -- finding an end to the violence and remorse that still dominates much of Northern Ireland despite the Belfast Agreement.
What makes the film's first half so engaging and, at times, riveting is Hirschbiegel's unsentimental focus on the moral injustice that follows the assassination. The innocent young boy is blamed and psychologically tortured by his grieving mother for the rest of his life while the killer enjoys the pride and privileges of a war hero. The resentment and grief come to bloom in the adults they become, and Nesbitt and Neeson play their roles with an intensity and physicality that suggests a passion play rather than a weighty two-act. Moments with each man in his car on the way to the meeting are deftly interspersed within the prolonged flashback of the murder, along with a fiery inner dialogue from Joe that lingers like a storm cloud over the proceedings.
Nesbitt barks the film's title to the crew's runner (Anamaria Marinca of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) in relation to his yearnings for vengeance. Absent of any real ideas -- cinematic, political or otherwise -Five Minutes of Heaven offers an easy solution for his anger but doesn't even have the gumption to sincerely explore said solution. As a recent New York Times article pointed out, the drama is based on two real men that have never met and, more than likely, never will. In other words, the film is a fantasy but one that straps the moral weight of a half-century-old conflict to its back for street cred.
