The fourth film about the IRA activist Bobby Sands, who died a political martyr through his 1981 hunger strike in the Maze prison, does away with any preambles as to what he was culpable of and concentrates solely on his final protest. In this way, the director McQueen is effectively electing to avoid becoming embroiled in the background facts of Sands's individual case and letting the human aspects of brutal incarceration and blindly unshakeable determination come across instead, unimpeded by the baggage of terrorism. Some would see this as a tacit condonement of the republican cause, and certainly juxtaposing Sands's pitifully wasted body with the voice of Margaret Thatcher condemning the strike gives the latter a heartlessly inhuman air. But the contrast intended is not so much between the IRA and the British state, rather than between fragile humanity and impersonal government: McQueen's film is not an outright espousal of Sands's cause, as the opinions voiced by the prison priest in the bravura 17-minute one-take scene in the middle of the film make clear. The dialogue in that scene in particular is constructed with a fierce intelligence and depth and gives the film its purpose. Added to that is McQueen's interest, as a visual artist, in the arrestingly powerful image, which makes the whole a hybrid of sorts between cinematic narrative and video installation art. To its great credit, it never loses itself in the experimental ground between the two.
8/10
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