Hey everybody, it’s movie time! I’m re-writing the words from the start of a Styx hit song and saying today is “movie time!” For movie time today, let’s watch “A Prayer for the Dying” with Mickey Rourke, Alan Bates and Bob Hoskins. Here is what should have been a great morality play, but filmmakers stumbled and offered up this slice of rank cheese.
“A Prayer for the Dying” is the story of an Irish Republican Army killer who, already disenchanted with life, hits bottom when his bomb blows up a bus full of schoolchildren. After that, he just wants out and doesn’t want to see violence ever again. Yet, he cannot escape either his past or his future.
Here is a nice morality play that has a church as its physical foundation; a priest and his niece as two sides to the same decent coin, but different in each’s own right; and a bad guy who’s all bad.
What’s too bad is how the film came out. “A Prayer for the Dying” is taken from a Jack Higgins novel of the same name, but doesn’t manage to convey much of what the novel accomplished.
It certainly isn’t because of the cast.
In “A Prayer for the Dying,” you get Oscar nominees (Rourke, Bates and Hoskins, but not for this stinker) as well as a thin supporting cast headlined by star-to-be Liam Neeson.
So, it shouldn’t have been difficult to bring this one into dock as at least a decent film … but blame is usually pointed at director Mike Hodges (or more likely it should be the producers since Hodges distanced himself from the film after the studio made changes he and Rourke did not approve).
In any case, here’s a terribly flawed film you should see, if nothing for the cast.
You’ll have to work a little bit at finding “A Prayer for the Dying” and when you do, you might want to see it … I guarantee it!
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