Released 1995
Stars Ian Hart, John Lynch, James Frain, Michael Gambon, Gary Lydon
Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan

"Nothing Personal" may very well be the first film to focus on the North Irish troubles from the Protestant Loyalist point of view--not the Catholic, not the IRA's, not the British, but the forgotten Ulster demographic without whom the conflict would've died years ago. Indeed, the British have long excused their largely economic stake in Ireland by way of the Loyalists, whose own guerrilla war against the terrorism of the Nationalist Catholics has been nothing if not equally vicious and ferociously righteous.

Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan deftly balances the political and personal, offsetting potentially melodramatic material with the cold facts of the Loyalist organization, the maddeningly ambiguous nature of guerrilla warfare, and the reality of waging a bloody war in a small city where everything eventually becomes a personal decision. Only in the film's climax do O'Sullivan and screenwriter Daniel Mornin cheat and lapse into an outright sucker punch. But for the most part, "Nothing Personal" is indelible and rigorous, abetted in no small measure by Lynch and Hart, two of Great Britain's best and most underappreciated young actors. Here's a razor-sharp antidote to the usual cinematic tendency to sentimentalize the Irish; it is to "Michael Collins" what "Platoon" is to John Wayne's "The Green Berets."

Summary by --Michael Atkinson