User Reviews

This is the first Ken Loach directed movie I have ever seen and I love it ! Rumour has it that it's not his best one; if that's true, I can't wait to see the others !! It is a great mix between comedy and drama, a bitter sweet comedy as they call it. The problem is that if you had asked me if I felt like watching a movie by an old English director I had never heard of, at the Sémaphore, well… I'd have answered very, very negatively. It seems to me that this movie is misclassified in the complicated/"grown-up" movies section because of Ken Loach's former movies and his political implication. As a matter of fact, watching the trailer was enough to convince me that I could enjoy it in spite of my preconceived ideas. (Albert's particularly funny, "Mona who ?!" ; "You're not gonna be sleeping again officer").

About the movie itself, I think the actors are so talented and the dialogue is so efficient and real that it looks like a documentary ! The Scottish accent sounds really funny and authentic but sometimes I actually wonder if they meant to say something or if they were just making strange noises !!! The music is well chosen and I really like it; I remember hearing Homebird by Foy Vance and I'm Gonna Be (500 miles) by The Proclaimers. I can't say much more about it because a part of the audience obviously wasn't interested in watching the movie and therefore got really noisy and annoying short after its beginning which luckily didn't prevent me from having a great time :) .

I have a mixed point of view on this film. I think that the characters are very stereotyped because they are rude and coarse and not very developed except Robbie who is the ''brain'' of the team as he will find a way to get them out of their bad situation. Some passages are a bit long and others are quite disgusting due to their violent or very stupid and rude attitude.

Yet, some comic situations enable us to ''get into the film''. I have appreciated Robbie's mental evolution thanks to his intelligence, his meeting with his educator and of course his becoming a father. At the end, all of them will start a new life, I love the idea that it's a message of hope to people who have problems.

A very good movie, positive, funny, full of energy and humor as often in Ken Loach. To see in the original version, for the invaluable accent of these Scot alive and kicking in front of what swamps them. A beautiful story. I loved this film and I came out with a light heart. Beautiful story takes a deep humanism, nice trajectory than the young offender who chooses to follow her heart line to grab a bit of trickery with the famous part of the angels who will change his life. Many of the British humor that makes their films tend to "social" is miles away from moralistic impositions that we are served in France. One thinks of Full Monty, we revel in the absurdity of nickel feet when we follow in the highlands, dressed in a kilt. It's just good, fresh, always tasteful, never headlock and perfectly controlled. A delight! A film with emotional ups and downs sometimes funny. It was a real friendship increases and changes in the film the main character. The suspense is present.

This movie was filmed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, all places my son and I visited by train about 20 years ago. For me that was a highlight of watching this, to see those places again.

I found it on Netflix streaming movies.

It is Robbie's story. Having grown up in a rough part of Glasgow he has already in his young age had a series of bad encounters with the law. He is a hot-head too, and when disrespected can easily go off to almost killing the victim. Now he has also gotten his girlfriend Leonie pregnant, much to the dissatisfaction of her dad, who even tries to bribe him with money to leave and never see his daughter again. Robbie doesn't have very good prospects.

Robbie's life begins to change when get gets on a work payback group for non capital offenders, basically being a supervised work crew to pay back society for their crimes. The monitor of the group, and the man with the van, gets them interested in Scotch Whiskey, and the title of this movie arises from a distillery tour when the young guide explains that in barrel aging a small percentage of the whiskey is lost forever through evaporation and they call that "the angel's share."

(NB - The Jim Beam company calls the whiskey trapped inside the wood at the end of aging, "the devil's share", and even sell a whiskey of that name where they claim to have extracted it from the wood. I have some and it in fact is pretty good.)

Anyway it turns out Robbie has a natural nose for discerning different qualities of whiskey, and I naturally thought that would lead him into getting a job with a distillery and be able to leave his former life, and build something better for Leonie and him. But the movie takes a quite different turn.

Good movie, I enjoyed it for the characters and the subject, both redemption and imagining being there in the whiskey tastings.

SPOILERS: Robbie finds out a very rare, very old whiskey is to be sold at auction, and in fact one bottle ended up going for over One Million pounds. But before the auction Robbie hatched a plan with his friends on the work gang, they visited the distillery, Robbie managed to hide among the casks through the night, his friends were outside with empty one- liter soda bottles, he opened the valuable cask and used long clear tubing to siphon off enough to fill 4 bottles. Then he took ordinary whiskey to back fill so that the 4 liters would not be missed. Even when cops stopped and searched them randomly afterwards, all the cops saw were 4 bottles of what they thought was soda. Robbie learned of a black market buyer and sold a bottle for 200,000 pounds and split it with the other 3, and bargained for a job for himself in the whiskey business. His hapless friends broke two of the bottles in a moment of stupidity, and he gave the 4th to the work supervisor who had introduced him to whiskey. But Robbie, Leonie, and their new baby were off to a new life near Stirling.

(NB- About 20 years ago we spent two nights in a hotel in Stirling which I like to describe as "the worst hotel in all of Scotland." It was their last weekend of operation, I suspect it was being demolished afterwards. The only good part was that they let us stay free, that's how close to "camping" it was. But I will always remember that hotel stay.)

Is Ken Loach Britain's very own Woody Allen? On the surface, the answer would most likely be no. Stylistically very different. Closer inspection, however, show greater parallels than one might initially imagine. Both are extremely prolific, well within their twilight years, both have to venture into Europe to secure their funding and both are completely and utterly adored by the French.

For Loach, forever on the periphery of popular culture (aside from Kes (1969), of course), things have never really been otherwise. In many ways, his films have provided a critical and unflinching picture of Britain throughout the last 40 years. Standing on the sidelines shining a light on the underdog and highlighting the gaps within the British class system, he has done so not with a crass voyeurism in the manner of a sneering class tourist, but with a sincere brushstroke of honesty. For all the destitution and violence, he has detailed the strong bonds that often exist within the deprived communities.

The Angel's Share marks the 12th film that he has directed with the accompaniment of writer, Peter Laverty; a fruitful partnership that started back with Carla's Song (1996). Sharing more in common with the lighthearted and breezy (for Loach) Looking for Eric (2009) than the subsequent Route Irish (2010), there is room for plenty of laughs with this particular band of merry brothers (and sister).

Opening with the sentencing of a number of delinquents to community service, the focus falls on young Robbie (Paul Brannigan), a ne'er do well who represents the latest in a long line of rogues born from his family's gene pool. With history seemingly set to repeat itself, and feuds with neighbouring families falling from one generation to the next, Robbie needs to break the cycle. If not for him, then for the child that is on its way. In a bitter twist, his pregnant girlfriend is the daughter of a rival family who do not look upon his presence kindly.

Under the tutelage of community service officer, Harry (a reliably solid John Henshaw), Robbie is not only able to fulfill his civic obligation, but he is also able to strike upon a previously unforeseen nasal talent, which offers a potential 'out' through the whiskey trade. To say anything else would be a spoiler. Suffice to say, somewhere along the line a plan is hatched.

Where the first half of this film offers a sombre, grimy look at Glasgow and the push and pull of family ties and tensions, the second half takes a far lighter tone. The first half is the more effective and compelling. In one scene, a meeting is set up where Robbie is confronted with the victim of his crime. Interspersed with flashbacks to the horrific violence that formed the basis of Robbie's conviction in time past, the effect is shocking. Loach has stated that he didn't want the flashbacks to be put in slow motion. He felt that this would diminish the brutality. He wanted to showcase the violence in real time. He wanted it to be visceral. He has succeeded. In fact, at first, the film struggles to recover from the power of this scene. The pace of the script counters this by flushing the narrative forward. It excels in doing so. There is a contagious bonhomie with all of the main characters, and the script has enough brio and warmth to engage the viewer. A minor quibble would be that the well performed Albert (Gary Maitland) suspends belief a little too far as a personality type, cast as he is in the idiot savant role. Still, there is certainly enough here for both emotional investment and a good few chuckles along the way.

The only section that could be accused of dragging is the main set-piece involving the heist. This is perhaps an unfair criticism, however, as the film has to unavoidably subscribe to genre conventions at this point. The screenplay does its job well in enabling the film to zip by without too much damage being done.

As a non-professional actor plucked from obscurity, Paul Brannigan's performance is outstanding, and he certainly stands to gain the most from this film's success. He is a natural, bringing both a strength and a vulnerability to Robbie.

In some quarters, this film has been referred to as being a Scottish Full Monty. This does not necessarily do either film any real service. It is true that both are heartwarming and feature the working class. This is not enough to lump them in as the equivalent of each other though.

As an intoxicating pick-me-up, the Angel's Share succeeds. Ken Loach has stepped further out into the light with this film, creating what is surely his most family friendly film (minus the swearing and violence of course, but you were never going to get a Mrs Doubtfire from him, were you?). Is this film perfect? No. However, just like the characters in the Angel's Share deserve a fair chance, so does this picture.

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