The character is tortured and the scenes were intense, he says, all the more so because they were shot in the final two days of filming.

Mr. Lynch recalls that when preparing for the role, the director, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, took him and two other actors in the film, Ian Hart and James Frain, to Belfast for research. This included spending a night drinking in bars in a staunchly Protestant area, and Mr. O'Sullivan made sure they were accompanied by two Protestant bodyguards.

"After a while," Mr. Lynch says, "I started to get odd looks from people who recognized me from 'Cal' and 'In the Name of the Father,' and eventually one of these young guys took a swing at me. And this was when the cease-fire was in all its glory."

But Dublin-born director Thaddeus O'Sullivan is hesitant to agree. He has tried to make films that are not just for Irish moviegoers but for international film audiences. As a result, O'Sullivan has watched his turn-of-the-century Irish romance "December Bride" go virtually unnoticed in America.

With his upcoming "Nothing Personal," which focuses on the strife of 1970s street life in Belfast, O'Sullivan is hoping to captivate Americans with a universal story. In order to ensure the film's universality, he does not want to delve into Ireland's complicated politics or convoluted history.

"I tried to make the film so that you didn't need to know about the politics involved in Ireland," O'Sullivan explains. "I'm interested in the war and Northern Ireland. It's something I feel very strongly about and I've lived close to it emotionally, but I wanted to talk about the universal thing which was the effect of that kind of violence on a community. I didn't want to explain Irish history to people."

Of course O'Sullivan could not completely ignore the nuances of Irish politics. He had to slip in enough historical information to make the characters' motivations logical to an international audience.

"Since I was making a film which had an Irish story in the background, I had to address it at the beginning, so there's some blather about who's a Loyalist and who's a Catholic," O'Sullivan says. "And I thought the sooner I get that out of the way, the better. I wanted the audience to relax - well, relax might be the wrong word for a film like this. But you don't need to know about the politics. You're not going to get a history lesson."

Some of the films that have attempted to convey Irish history and espouse Irish politics, like "In the Name of the Father" and "Michael Collins," have found international success. But O'Sullivan explains that these political films can capture worldwide interest because they are good stories, not cinematized Irish history lectures.

"You can't go off into some explanation of, 'Well in 1921, Ireland became divided, and blah, blah, blah,'" O'Sullivan says. "It's in one ear and out the other. Sure people watched 'Michael Collins.' They watched the character. They can't remember anything about what he stood for.

"I think there are ways of making a film exciting and historically relevant too. 'Michael Collins' is an exciting film but it's also a serious subject. It's quite a balancing act. I think you have to be quite a clever filmmaker to achieve that balance. It's the old story of commerce vs. art. It has to sell. But everybody wants to make interesting, relevant films. Even the studios, they want to make interesting films."

And audiences, like investors, want to watch films that are as important as they are entertaining. They are not, however, eager to see a film with no entertainment value and chock full of international politics.

"The audience will watch a film if it's a good movie," O'Sullivan says. "They're not clamoring to see films about Ireland. The movies are just interesting movies, and yes, some Irish films have grabbed America's attention. But I don't think the Americans are saying, 'I wanna go see a film about Northern Ireland.'"

So America does not have the patience to piece together Ireland's fragmented history, but there are aspects of Irish society that make for great movies. And America seems to eat up the violence so prevalent in modern Irish films.

"The violence of Northern Ireland, the 25 years of it, has created a whole culture of gangsterism," says O'Sullivan. "Availability of guns and an attitude of violence, they've just permeated through the culture, North and South. So it has kind of enabled a kind of gangster culture to grow more quickly. And you see that in a lot of the movies about Ireland."

As much as the violence fascinates Americans, it often makes them wonder why men and women would live in constant danger of brutal civil skirmishes. When O'Sullivan is asked why people in the cities he portrays put up with the perpetual violence, he turns his focus to America's own violent culture.

"It's like you ask somebody in South Central, 'Why do you live here?'" O'Sullivan says. "And they say, 'It's my home.' You could say the same to people in Northern Ireland and they'd say that this is their home and their roots go back for generations, several hundreds of years.

"Maybe that's why Irish films work in America - both cultures have their fair share of violence. At least that's why good Irish movies work at the box office. Americans are sort of just looking at their own culture."

Pictured with director of "Nothing Personal," Thaddeus O' Sullivan (front row), are stars (Back row-left to right) James Frain, Ian Hart and Gary Lydon.

Nothing Personal, much like In the Name of the Father, begins with an IRA bomb blast destroying a pub. The time frame -- the middle '70s -- is the same. Only the location is different -- this is Belfast, not Guildford. However, where In the Name of the Father used Ireland's troubles as a backdrop for a compelling story about family and justice, Nothing Personal makes the religious strife its centerpiece. O'Sullivan goes to great pains to show the violence and hatred on both sides, effectively de- politicizing the movie. If balance was the only criteria for a good film about Ireland, Nothing Personal would get top marks.

Unfortunately, in his pursuit of even-handedness, O'Sullivan fails to create more than a few worthwhile characters. The atmosphere, thick with claustrophobia, paranoia, and a pervasive sense of impending doom, is potent in a way that the protagonists aren't. Most of the men in Nothing Personal represent different faces of unintelligent bigotry. There's Ginger (Ian Hart), a borderline psycho who enjoys killing Catholics; Kenny (James Frain), the leader of a militant anti-IRA group; Eddie (Gary Lydon), Kenny's right-hand man; Tommy (Ruaidhri Conroy), a 17-year old recruit to the cause; and Leonard (Michael Gambon), Kenny's politically- savvy commander. None of these individuals are nearly as interesting as their cause. The characters who capture our attention are those without a strong political allegiance: Liam (John Lynch), a Catholic who is mistaken for an IRA member; Ann (Maria Doyle Kennedy), Kenny's estranged wife; and Kathleen (Jeni Courtney), Liam's young, headstrong daughter.

While Nothing Personal might have been more focused had it concentrated on fewer individuals, O'Sullivan elected to try to cram in everyone's story. As a result, the motion picture is frequently confusing (occasionally bordering on chaotic), and Liam, who represents the emotional center, is only on-screen for about a third of the running time. And, while there is power in the way Nothing Personal is resolved, there's also something about the ending that seems inevitable, obligatory, and more than a little manipulative.

The most telling point addressed by O'Sullivan's film is how a legacy of violence and bloodshed is passed down from generation to generation. Nothing Personal has its share of young faces -- in addition to Tommy and Kathleen, there's Kathleen's brother, and a teen IRA sympathizer named Michael. Events during the course of this film shape their futures and give us little confidence that there will be a peaceful, reasonable end to the conflict.

Even if their characters aren't all that well-developed, several of the leads give memorable performances -- notably Ian Hart (Hollow Reed), whose Ginger is a portrait of uncurbed aggression; James Frain, who injects an aspect of humanity into Kenny; and the ever-effective Michael Gambon. John Lynch, who is no stranger to films with this background (he was in both In the Name of the Father and Mother's Son) has a few effective moments as one of the film's innocents. And Jeni Courtney, who was so impressive in John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, steals every one of the too-few scenes she's in.

Explorations of violence -- its causes, its meaning, and its effects -- are difficult to present on film because they're so easy to get wrong. With Nothing Personal, Catholic director O'Sullivan, along with his Protestant screenwriter, Daniel Mornin, has ventured into that uncertain territory. And, while the result is not an unqualified success, there's no denying that O'Sullivan's message comes across loud-and-clear, and Nothing Personal presents at least one image that will not quickly be forgotten. Too bad there couldn't be more.

The usually trustworthy Hart is dirty fun as a psycho "nauseating shite," to quote one of the characters, and the film could have used much more of Cathy White, who plays a once-pretty floozy in orange who sings a Protestant dirge titled "Billy McFadzean." Mornin's screenplay is appropriately hard-boiled ("Ye'll be playin' football in no time," some thugs tell a man just before they kneecap him), but the mood matches the title. Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan isn't cold-hearted enough to revel in the violence, but he's too conscientious not to put it all up on screen. To a foreigner, the film is not much more than one act of violence topped with other, sometimes as a spectator sport, sometimes a nose-rubbing.

Ian Hart won the Best Supporting Actor award at the Venice Film Festival for his performance as a fanatical Loyalist assassin in Nothing Personal (1997).

Thaddeus O'Sullivan's "Nothing Personal" sticks more to the topic at hand. The down-and-dirty jobs of the men who perform the kidnappings, knee-cappings, and other assorted barbarisms unique to the Irish "troubles" are what this story is about, and that's the simultaneous strength and weakness of the movie as a whole. In a way, this is a sort of Irish/Protestant take on Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mafia film, "Mean Streets." As in that film, a somewhat more sophisticated foot soldier (James Frain) covers for his violent, dim-bulb buddy (Ian Hart) while the chain of command looks on disapprovingly.

Hart is known to American audiences for his performance as the young John Lennon in "Backbeat." In fact, until now I've never seen Hart play a role except that of John Lennon. He first made a splash in a beautifully realized hour-long film called "The Hours and the Times," a fictional rendering of a sexually charged 1963 weekend holiday taken by Lennon and The Beatles' closeted homosexual manager, Brian Epstein. Anyone who is going to play "the cynical Beatle" had better have a way with a cruel put-down, and Hart certainly does.

In "Nothing Personal" he plays Ginger, a sadistic little jerk who's too dumb to fight with mere words. He relies, to a sometimes nauseating degree, on the power of guns and switchblades. Again, the "Mean Streets" connection is obvious, with Ginger being a more overtly lethal variation on Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy character. One of the first scenes in the film finds Ginger waiting for, then chasing down, a Catholic man who has exited a pub. Ginger cares not a whit whether the people he kills are involved in acts of terrorism. Any Catholic will do. He shoots the man in the back, then whips out a knife and performs a (mercifully unspecified) mutilation.

Hart's Ginger is not quite the charismatic live-wire he needs to be in order to make the story completely successful. James Frain's Kenny, though often just as violently explosive as Ginger, seems far too intelligent to continue being seen in public with this self-righteous monster. Their non-violent scenes together are meant to establish an emotional bond that would explain Kenny's loyalty, but far too much of their screen time is spent screaming and poking at each other. You have to do some pretty precise tap dancing to make these kinds of characters appear as both cold-blooded murderers and sentimental pub buddies, and O'Sullivan doesn't seem to be up to the challenge all of the time.

That isn't to say that he's not a solid director. The performances are uniformly fine (Frain is especially strong), but O'Sullivan has trouble with the momentum of the story. Actually, a lot of the problem can probably be traced to the subject matter. Sudden bursts of violence are best used to punctuate stories. That doesn't work here because, to a large degree, these guys are sudden bursts of violence waiting to happen. We don't get enough insight into the rift between the battling factions. I have an Irish friend who says that most people in Northern Ireland don't have a clear conception of exactly why everyone is shooting and bombing each other to kingdom come. They just do it because it's always been done. This is the case with most ongoing feuds, but, true or not, it doesn't make for particularly riveting storytelling.

The script is rather so-so, seeming more like a series of nicely drawn character sketches than anything else. You can't help but get a little overripe when dealing with such operatic emotions, but the final 10 or 15 minutes of the film are absurdly melodramatic. I won't reveal what happens, but it isn't too hard to spot the character that will end up being a sacrificial lamb in the final reel. Still, considering the alternatives, you could do a lot worse than "Nothing Personal" -- and I mean a lot. Remember, the summer movie season is just around the corner, and Batman doesn't pause from the roar-crash-boom to debate politics. I sure wouldn't mind seeing him take one in the kneecap, though.

Thankfully, Thaddeus O'Sullivan is smarter than all that. What's more, he's Irish and so is his new film. "Nothing Personal" is a sophisticated, at times utterly riveting, drama about the clandestine workings of Belfast's rival guerrilla militias, the IRA and the Ulters Volunteers in the turbulent '70s. It dispenses with the obligatory accouterments of Irish films (no Sinead O'Connor or Cranberries songs to be found) and focuses on refreshingly unheroic, average people during the troubles of the '70s.

It's a world of closed-door politics, betrayal, mistrust, adolescent urges and the quotidian hardships of a society whose turmoil has grown larger than the sum of its parts. O'Sullivan unveils a conflict in which innocence and guilt, violence and ideology, dwell in ambiguous regions.

But, unlike most films of its kind, "Nothing Personal" observes common people who have a dimension other than their political or religious affiliations. They're not heroes or emblems, they're multidimensional creatures. They drink beer, go to night clubs, ogle women, feel regret and even lay claim to certifiable emotions. In short, they have not been distilled to the morally asinine cardboard cut-outs that seem to be requisite for mainstream audiences. This is a complicated film which has to be carefully followed in order to absorb its subtle observations.

That O'Sullivan assembled a small band of tremendous actors makes the film all the more wrenching. James Frain ("Shadowlands") plays the Protestant paramilitarist Kenny, who's being pressured to rein in his all-too-zealous sidekick Ian Hart ("Land and Freedom," "Michael Collins," "Backbeat"). The two stumble upon John Lynch ("In the Name of the Father," "Moll Flanders"), a Catholic who's found himself on the wrong side of the barricade after a night of fighting. Michael Gambon also stars as a field general of the Loyalist men, dealing with both internal pressures and his rival IRA liaison in one of the political substrains that makes this film fascinating.

"Nothing Personal" is not without its flaws. At times it propels itself with all the clunky misfooting of a television movie, and the very last scene seems rather overly-contrived for a film that didn't really need to resort to pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy. But, during its stronger moments of real insight and gripping tension, "Nothing Personal" is one of the most convincing portraits of the foot soldiers and bystanders in a war that defies reason and certainly generalization.

John Nein

Grade: A-

This W. B. Yeats quote appears at the very beginning of Nothing Personal, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's film set in Belfast during a 1975 "truce" between the Protestant Loyalists and Catholic Republicans. These remarkable lines of poetry, written by a Protestant Irishman with Catholic sympathies and quoted so often you'd think they were the only lines Yeats had ever written, provide a perfect introduction to this deeply compelling if not strikingly original look at the Irish Troubles.

Nothing Personal was adapted by Protestant screenwriter Daniel Mornin from his novel All Our Fault, and Catholic director O'Sullivan appears to have been influenced by Gillo Pontecorvo's movie The Battle of Algiers (which is acknowledged in the end credits) and Martin Scorsese's movie Mean Streets. O'Sullivan's movie begins with the bombing of a Protestant pub, then shows the bodies being removed from the rubble, an early indication that this film is primarily about the human cost of violence. The movie doesn't delve much into the reasons for the conflict, concentrating instead on what it does to the people who are caught up in it.

The film's characters include Kenny (James Frain), the relatively level-headed but still thuggish leader of a Protestant paramilitary group; Ginger (Ian Hart), the group psycho who creates problems for his friend Kenny; Leonard (Michael Gambon), Kenny's secretive and cynical superior, who resembles a gangster boss; Leonard's Catholic equivalent, Cecil (Gerard McSorley); Liam (John Lynch), a Catholic single father who gets caught in the Protestant sector after curfew; and Liam's nine-year-old daughter (Jeni Courtney), who wanders into dangerous territory looking for her dad. The performances are excellent, and the city has a personality of its own - gray by day, garishly lit by night, it's a rather bleak looking place.

The movie provides a convincingly realistic look at the lives of the characters, at least until the contrived, operatic conclusion. I cared about the people in this film (or at least some of them), and I found their situation sad and depressing. The message seems to be that violence corrupts all sides in a conflict. This isn't an original insight, and it can even be a disingenuous cop-out in some situations, but it works well in this context. In the early parts of the film it was a little hard to keep track of who was fighting for what, but that was probably part of the point.

Loyalty to friends clashes bloodily with loyalty to state in Nothing Personal, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's strife-torn tale of early seventies Belfast. And though the violence in Northern Ireland seems to have abated, the warning of this film is clear: Years of hatred are not easily forgotten, and the actions of a few threaten the cleverest cease-fire.

O'Sullivan focuses on Kenny, a young, charismatic Loyalist hitman, and Liam, a young Catholic father whose love for his children is his reason for living. Kenny is dark, attractive, and a lethal shot. He and his band of accomplices are the killing arm of the Loyalists. But, with a truce in the works, even he finds it hard to restrain his men. Liam, on the other hand, is unwittingly caught up in a maelstrom of events he cannot control.

With this uncompromising, hypnotic tale of blood and revenge, O'Sullivan gets into the heads of the opposing parties: the nihilistic opportunism of their hit men, their family life, their partying and pub chatter, and their thirst for revenge over slights read and imagined. Nothing Personal is a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, where passion and hubris can only have dire consequences. O'Sullivan shows the turmoil that consumed Belfast for decades from an intensely personal point of view.

-- Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival