Route Irish

Some background. "Route Irish" is the road from Baghdad International Airport to the secured Green Zone in the centre of the city. It has been described as the most dangerous road in the world, rife with ambushes, IEDs, random gunfire, etc. And of course, it's this road that everybody arriving in Baghdad on some sort of business must travel. And so, there's quite a security trade, private security contractors employing ex-soldiers to bodyguard various people and packages on this route. And it's this that's the basis of the film.

We have two ex-army scousers, and best mates, Frankie (John Bishop) and Fergus (Mark Womack). I say we have them; at the outset of the film, we have, sadly, a pine box containing not quite all of Frankie. The pair of them have been working for a private security company in Iraq, and while Fergus has been back in the UK, Frankie's been killed in action on Route Irish, escorting a journalist. We're told by their bosses that it's just an unfortunate case of "wrong place, wrong time". Fergus, however is having none of this.

Being unwilling to believe that no-one is responsible, and tortured by the guilt of having recruited Frankie to work for this company in the first place, Fergus embarks on a crusade to determine just who's responsible, and get justice.

Now, obviously, this is a Ken Loach film, so we aren't talking Matt Damon's Green Zone here. If anything, it feels like the TV Drama Hillsborough, focussing on the grief of the bereaved, and a seemingly unquenchable desire for more justice, regardless of the current findings. In many respects, Fergus is well on his way down the path to the film's conclusion long before he's uncovered any wrongdoing; he has a need to uncover it long before he could reasonably expect it to exist. He's looking for someone else to punish for his own guilt.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any cheerier, there's the waterboarding. I won't get into the specifics of why, but in the later stages of the film there is a very, very graphic scene of torture by waterboarding. And, I find, they managed to film it with such authenticity by actually waterboarding the guy - that is, the actor was actually put through the actual waterboarding process by the other actor in the scene. To the point that he suffered post-traumatic stress afterwards. I don't know how to feel about this; it echoes another thing in the film, the use of actual stock footage of victims of war. In this film, you're not just being asked to think about something appalling happening, you're asked to watch a genuine reconstruction.

It's powerful. It sends a message. It makes you think. But there's a sense of disquiet in watching it that is nothing to do with acting or filmmaking; you get to look into the eyes of a man genuinely in fear of his life. I can't decide or not whether this is responsible thing for them to have done. I feel like I should have been warned, and that it was somehow inappropriate to present such a thing in a fictional context.

In any case, other than that scene, I can't really fault the film much. There are the usual hallmarks of Ken Loach social realism, to the point where you get a couple of scousers shouting at each other, and it's as genuinely unintelligible as the real experience. But it grips you, it moves you, and if there's any fault to the piece at all, it's that it's preaching to the choir somewhat; I don't think there's many people who ever sat down to watch any Ken Loach film who thought waterboarding was a good idea.