The Devil's Own (1997)

Film: The Devil's Own (1997)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, George Hearn

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1990's, Harrison Ford was almost sixty years old, and despite decades of action films, he was starting to show that age.  Instead of playing young rebels & sexy professors onscreen, he was playing the president in movies like Air Force One.  Ford was still an incredibly bankable star (Air Force One was a huge hit & would have long pop culture legs-it's still one of the films that's most name-checked for him), but it was also obvious that gravy train was about to end, and you see that in a film like The Devil's Own released in the same year.  Ford himself had seen a previous generation's action hero serve as his mentor in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery playing his father as Connery's career had started to fade.  Here, he was now taking over the father figure role, and young Brad Pitt is the sexy upstart who is at the center of the film even if Harrison Ford gets top billing.  The result is a movie that doesn't really work, and would unfortunately be the harbinger of a lot of Ford films to come.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frankie McGuire (Pitt), a member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who saw his father gunned down for sympathizing with the republicans in the 1970's, and has now joined them & is trying to buy missiles in the United States.  He does so by staying with an NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara (Ford), and his family, and we get a few cute scenes where Frankie & Tom bond over shooting pool (and his daughters all develop schoolgirl crushes on the comely Frankie).  But the movie takes a dark turn when the actual task at-hand, buying the missiles from a violent Irish mobster named Billy Burke (Williams) starts to end in bloodshed.  The film becomes a standoff between Frankie, who inadvertently has made Tom's family the target of violent criminals, and Tom himself, now trying to save Frankie as he knows he's headed for either prison or death at this point.

The film's politics are a bit hard to decipher, and haven't aged super well.  The Good Friday Agreements that would happen the following year make trying to decipher which side you were on very different than in the 1990's when the violence in Ireland would've been on the nightly news regularly (I would assume a lot of modern audiences wouldn't entirely know what to do with Pitt's character here).  The film also glorifies the "honest cop" who still lies to get his partner off for murder, and Ford's character in an era were law enforcement is not universally shorthand for being the "good guys" is a bit tough, and honestly indicates in part why the action genre struggled to stay super relevant into the 21st Century.  This bit also feels tagged on, which if you read about the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie, it was (and caused friction between Ford & Pitt, who would never work together again).

But the bigger problem might be the film gets really dull after a while.  There's not enough new here-the film could've used more scenes with the two men together, having them play off of one another and giving us a better sense of their relationship before they start pointing guns at the other guy.  Much has been made about Pitt's (shaky) Irish accent through the years for this film, and I'm not going to pretend it's good, but Pitt is so beautiful and so easy onscreen I don't really care that he doesn't sound super authentic.  Ford, as well, is a solid leading man but he doesn't take to the complicated aspects of the film, and is too stoic compared to Pitt, and honestly (in my opinion) gets outplayed by him.  Ford is so serious that he borders on two-dimensional.  Gone is the easy charm of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and we don't have the thrills & stakes of something like The Fugitive (nor the actorly sophistication of The Conversation or The Mosquito Coast).

This would in part be the future of Harrison Ford as he would continue to work.  With the exception of What Lies Beneath (I wish he'd done more horror in his career, as this film is terrific), the next few years would be a series of missteps, critically & financially, even in the action genre with pictures like Firewall and K-19: The Widowmaker (I actually saw this in theaters, making me one of the few who did, and found my ticket stub for it randomly the other day...if my brother makes it this far in the review, curious if he remembers which theater we saw this in).  Much of the next few decades would involve revisiting roles (to differing success) in the Star Wars, Blade Runner, & Indiana Jones franchises, but by-and-large, Ford would never really recapture the glamour of either his action hero heyday nor of his unique acting ability in auteur-driven dramas, and in the past few years his best work has been in television.

Next month, we're going to shift to an actor who was very much Ford's action star peer, and like Ford would end up watching his once impenetrable action hero career go down in flames in the late 1990's.  But while Ford would go on to middling success in a series of notable flops, this actor would encounter a second act so unlikely, it would've been scoffed had it been in one his movies (proving that occasionally, truth IS stranger than fiction).