[imagesource: Kerry Brown/Bleecker Street]

Right around the world, the Irish are loved and adored.

Okay, maybe not so much in England, but on the whole, the Irish are a popular bunch.

The news that there’s a big-time Hollywood rom-com set in Ireland on the way should have been greeted with excitement, but instead, it’s led to backlash across the country, with the trailer being torn to shreds.

Soon after it dropped on November 10, Wild Mountain Thyme came under fire “as dollops of synthetic paddywhackery followed broad cultural stereotype followed borderline national insult”.

Those are the words of the BBC’s John Maguire, and he was far from alone in dishing out critique:

…I rubbed my ears in disbelief as our melodious native accent was mangled beyond recognition once again by an actor playing “Irish”…

“While remembering it’s not fair to judge a film on its trailer, the accents are all over the place,” admonishes Gerry Grennell, performance and dialogue coach at Dublin’s Bow Street Academy for Screen Acting. ”

Things aren’t helped by the writing, which is the same ‘faith and begorrah, top o’ the mornin’, may the road rise to meet you’ rubbish that was old hat in the 1940s. It’s pretty dismal.”

At this point, let’s just watch the trailer, featuring big names like Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Christopher Walken, and Jon Hamm:

There are so many horrid accents on show, but to use a popular Irish phrase, Christopher Walken can feck right off.

Irish-American John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, was also widely scorned, especially after he said that “if my characters sounded exactly like my Irish relatives spoke, no one would understand them”.

Well, we understood Brad Pitt in Snatch, didn’t we?

When Ireland’s National Leprechaun Museum puts the boot in, you know you’ve missed the mark:

Even we think this is a bit much #WildMountainThyme https://t.co/Pl7SA4JoK6

— Leprechaun Museum (@leprechaun_ie) November 10, 2020

Let’s pivot to The A.V. Club’s review of the movie, which starts with “There are bad movies, and then there are the mystifyingly bad ones”:

…the characterizations, motivations, dialogue, and acting in this film are all so clumsy and baffling—at one point, Blunt stands up from a table but doesn’t straighten her back, instead shuffling forward like she’s contracted an instant case of kyphosis—that a bad regional inflection is just one sin among many.

I’m quite enjoying this, actually.

Over on IndieWire, Wild Mountain Thyme has been dubbed “the year’s most demented rom-com”:

…the only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of “Wild Mountain Thyme” dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute. Needless to say, nobody got hurt.

And yet, for a movie that often feels like a feature-length infomercial for Aer Lingus and builds to what might just be the single most absurd reveal in the history of narrative fiction

Ah yes, the massive plot twist at the end. Not my words, but “the truth will shamrock you to your bones”.

No spoilers from me, so you’ll either have to watch the movie or do your own digging online.

Let’s give the last word to Irish comedian Dylan Moran:

[sources:bbc&avclub&indiewire]