Since this increasingly legendary film starring Michael Flatley was briefly aired at London’s Raindance film festival in 2018 – a screening from which the media were barred – reports of it have been scattered, disjointed, unreliable. Like witnesses to a 10-bus pile-up on top of children coming out of a nursery school, those who saw it were traumatised and gibbering. The trailer which finally dropped online earlier this year was very disturbing, as it confirmed that the film really does exist.
Riverdance hoofer Flatley really has produced, written, directed and starred in his own film in which he plays Victor Blackley, a supercool secret agent codenamed “Blackbird”, leader of an undercover special forces unit called “the Chieftains”, like the folk band. Very often, Flatley has a secret half-smile with narrowed eyes; at other times his face is strangely blank and yet intent, like a tourist who has swum away from the other holiday-makers in the Mediterranean to secretly relieve himself in the sea.
When Victor failed to prevent his wife being killed by terrorists in some godless foreigner-jungle or other (the agonised flashbacks are not quite clear on the point) he was deeply upset. His wife’s burial takes place in the grounds of Victor’s spectacular home in the Irish Republic, filmed at Flatley’s own mansion Castle Hyde House in County Cork. (Weirdly, however, his secret agent activities seem to be coordinated from Westminster, by a shadowy fixer played by Patrick Bergin.)
Victor wears a black hat at a rakish angle for the funeral service. He quits secret-agenting and saunters enigmatically off to run a luxury Caribbean hotel, nursing his broken heart and wearing a white tuxedo with a panama hat, also at a rakish angle, perhaps imagining himself to be a mix of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Sean Connery as 007; he gives orders in a sub-Liam-Neeson growl. But when a sinister arms dealer played by Eric Roberts shows up as a hotel guest, and is engaged to his old friend Vivian (Nicole Evans) who has no idea of what a rotter he is, it is clear that Victor is going to have resume his secret agent vocation to destroy him.
In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old’s idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985. Flatley has loads of pouting women in bikinis everywhere, doing nothing. Everyone appears to have taken extra-strong OxyContin tablets before the cameras rolled. Each line is calculated to induce a nervous breakdown in the audience. When Michael Flatley actually has to hold up a sim card and say: “This holds the formula – it can kill millions of people!” I had to lie down on the floor while a team of paramedics gave me oxygen.
The big scene is when Flatley and Eric Roberts, both lavishly tuxed, play a game of high-stakes poker, a confrontation of alpha-male hombres which is clearly supposed to have the charge of 007 playing Le Chiffre at chemin de fer, but which actually has all the excitement of a nil-nil draw between Grimsby Town and Tranmere Rovers. And when Flatley punches out a henchman-baddie 10 times his size, it is a moment of unintentional comedy on a scale to rival the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games.
Really, I wanted Flatley to put his arms ramrod-straight down by his sides and then dance over the prostrate bodies of his enemies. Let’s hope there will be dancealong screenings of Blackbird in which audiences can stand up in rows, link arms and express their complex feelings about this film in a choreography of their own.
• Blackbird is released on 2 September in cinemas in the UK and Ireland.
