This is a film about the English army and their so-called peace keeping role in Northern Ireland during the Catholic-Protestant violent struggles during the 1970’s (euphemistically known by its Irish name of ‘the troubles’). The title is really a bit too cryptic as,even for those involved in the Troubles, this abbreviated date isn’t particularly iconic.

’71’s hero/protagonist is Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell who has very recently jumped into the limelight in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken); an ordinary solider, a grunt, deployed in Belfast in the aforementioned year with apparently very little understanding of what he is supposed to do. The inciting incident is that, during a botched army raid in central Belfast, his unit is forced to leave him behind and he has to find his way back ‘behind enemy lines’ as it were.

To add to the general confusion there are two sorts of operatives working on the British side; the regular Army and the more devious secret service men who seems to be dangerously in cahoots with the Protestant extremists. On top of that not everyone is playing fair and, when several of them cross lines in order to pursue their increasingly arcane deals and strategic ends, things becomes hopelessly and murderously confused. It doesn’t help the trying-to-catch-up audience that several of the actors look very similar and a lot of the action is shot on the run in the half dark. Thick Ulster accents, whilst authentic enough, may not help comprehension either. One could see this film being subtitled for an American release.

The film is tense enough in its way. New-to-film director Yann Demange is clearly as much interested in the straight action scenes as the characters. Though there are some tense standoffs and cunningly contrived urban chase sequences a lot of the film will leave non-action fans cold. The other problem perhaps, is that the film has been made so late, it now seems very ‘historical’. Also, better films (for example, Pete Travis’s brilliant Omagh (2004)) covered slightly similar territory a long time ago.

The Ulster conflict does need a multi-vocal text as the Troubles were not only internecine but labyrinthine in their complexity. The endless splits between the various factions of the ‘gunmen’ are sketched in here but it needed a little more background somehow. Despite some earnest attempt at gritty authenticity, one can’t escape the feeling that Demange could have easily have set his film in the Lebanon or during the Gulf War or any one of a dozen trouble spots. Maybe that too is part of the point; war is war and it never ends well.

// JULIAN WOOD

Previewed at Sony Theatre, Sydney, on 14 January 2015