"Whole Lotta Sole" - Oscar-winning Terry George’s celebration of Belfast and its characters

Into this powder keg set up comes the police detective Weller (Colm Meaney) a foul mouthed, old school street-smart detective who’s determined to stop the situation from escalating fatally.

It being the north a hostage crisis is the last thing the powers that be want splashed across the world’s headlines, and the unaccredited but always-superb Tom Hollander gives a hilarious cameo as a British Ministry of Defense flunky anxious to avoid cross community conflicts at all costs.

What no one but Mad Dog knows that the contents of Jimbo’s stolen bag could bring down his whole criminal empire and he has plans of his own to dispose of the evidence.

The legacy of the conflict haunts the edges of Whole Lotta Sole in interesting ways, but this is a comedy caper and the spirited cast set to work with gusto. As a traveler mother with two kids caught up in the siege, actress Marie Jones is a five-alarm fire of indignation and swearing. Jones inhabits her character (and the spirit of the city itself really) so vividly you’ll want to watch a sequel that focuses on her.

David O’Hara also deserves a special mention for his sensationally funny and menacing turn as Mad Dog Flynn. When he leans in toward Jimbo and says, “I want your wee son,” in his slow Belfast accent you won’t know whether to laugh or shiver.

As Joe Maguire, the likable but very out of his depth Yankee blow in, Fraser gives a charming but low-key performance. The one-time screen god portrays Maguire as a rather haunted looking middle aged man whose youthful confidence seems to have been replaced by a forty-something world weariness that speaks of one too many disappointments along the way.

It’s a new kind of character from Fraser’s repertoire and he’s utterly convincing. Maguire, we discover, may or may not be Jimbo’s long-lost dad via a summer fling with his mother in the 1980s, and this connection brings all the plot points together neatly as the action kicks in.

Newcomer and Belfast native McCann, 28, gets the best possible exposure in his role as Jimbo, the sensitive and excitable would be hood who can’t find the necessary bluster to fool anyone that he’s not a good guy. McCann also stars in the popular $30 million British TV miniseries Titanic Blood and Steel this month and his star is firmly on the rise. In Whole Lotta Sole he’s proved he can carry a feature, and he steals a few scenes from veteran Fraser.

Some scenes are true comic stand out, such as Jimbo’s botched fish market hold up. Burdened with a hair trigger submachine gun that really belongs in a museum, when it fires by accident the tension and the misunderstandings build to a comic climax that delighted the Tribeca Film Festival audience at its debut screening.

Belfast was at war for decades, but in Whole Lotta Sole it has finally found its way toward peace and, as George’s new film makes clear, towards reconciliation too. 

That reconciliation is personified in Meany’s gruff detective Weller, who has to accept that his policeman son has taken his wife’s Catholic faith rather than his own Protestantism. That Weller can accept the changing times without wanting to change the people that create them is a measure of the new reality in the north that the film quietly celebrates.

​
Nster.com