Traders

Ireland's history with genre films is a little messy at best. There were a spate of Tarantino-esque films in the late '90s and early '00s that just didn't work at all. Since then, Ireland's output has tended more towards the serious, dramatic stories or its wonderful animated output. There's never been an Irish John Carpenter or Wes Craven to take on the underbelly of Irish society, but Traders is a decent shot at it.

Killian Scott is a financial guru who's out of a job and desperate. His colleague, Game of Thrones' John Bradley, has come up with a particularly brutal method of helping people in similar circumstances out of their hardship - by liquidating their assets into cash and fighting to the death. The winner buries the other and takes their cash and moves on to the next trade. There's a serious needlessly complex rules surrounding how they get to the fight, but that's the crux of it. Little by little, Killian Scott's character begins to become good - very good, in fact - at trading. However, when John Bradley sees that he's effectively cutting him out, he contacts Peter O'Meara to see if he knows anyone who can fight on his behalf. Fellow Love / Hate alumni Barry Keoghan enters trading, proving himself to be more vicious than any other participant in the game.

What's interesting about Peter Murphy and Rachel Moriarty's approach to the story is that, despite it being set entirely in Ireland, the idea could easily be executed and carried out anywhere. Sure, it might have a certain commonality with Fight Club, but it's only superficial. The idea of trading is darkly funny and the sort of thing you'd expect David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker to come up with, not something from our own shores. Where the film begins to falter, sadly, is in its execution. Although the fight sequences are filmed in a very realistic way, there's a sense that more could have been done with them. One or two of them are quite visceral and there's something quite funny about seeing a well-known Irish comedian being mercilessly stabbed to death by an actor from Love / Hate.

Killian Scott handles himself well, as does John Bradley and Peter O'Meara. O'Meara, in particular, brings a level of malice to the table whilst Barry Keoghan's near-feral intensity is arresting. There's an underdeveloped romantic subplot between John Bradley, Scott and Nika McGuigan that feels as if it was tacked on at the last minute. This does tend to slow down the film considerably as it diverts attention away from what the film is all about - people fighting to the death for money. Even the characters that turn up for the various fights are much, much more interesting than this subplot - including a middle-aged man who fights with a chain lasso. However, it's a shame that these larger-than-life characters are forced to fight without much in the way of visual flair or without any interesting backdrop, save for a dingy-looking industrial estate.

Ultimately, it's the lack of a decent budget that prevents Traders from fully realising itself, meaning that while it's all morbidly fascinating, it doesn't really lift off as well as it should. As it stands, it's reasonably entertaining and the idea is pretty solid, however with stronger production values and more visual flair, it could be really something.