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  • Genre: Drama
  • Release Date: 08/21/2009
  • Running Time: 90 mins
  • Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
  • Cast: Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt, Anamaria Marinca, Niamh Cusack, Conor MacNeill, Lalor Roddy, Barry McEvoy, Richard Dormer, Paul Kennedy, Jonathan Harden
  • Producer: Eoin O'Callaghan
  • Writer: Guy Hibbert
  • Distributor: IFC Films
  • Watch Trailer
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Box Office

  1. 2012, 65.2 mil, 65.2 mil
  2. Disney's A Christmas Carol, 22.3 mil, 63.3 mil
  3. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, 5.9 mil, 8.7 mil
  4. Men Who Stare at Goats, 5.9 mil, 23.0 mil
  5. Michael Jackson's This Is It, 5.1 mil, 67.2 mil
  6. The Fourth Kind, 4.6 mil, 20.4 mil
  7. Couples Retreat, 4.2 mil, 102.0 mil
  8. Paranormal Activity, 4.0 mil, 103.7 mil
  9. Law Abiding Citizen, 3.8 mil, 67.2 mil
  10. The Box, 3.2 mil, 13.2 mil
Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Five Minutes of Heaven

Guy Hibbert’s novel-writing process for Five Minutes of Heaven is an interesting experiment. In 1975, Ulster Alistair Little killed Catholic Joe Griffen’s brother; decades later, the two unburdened themselves to Hibbert about the event and speculated on what would happen if they ever met. (They never did.) Then, Hibbert wrote this movie. He and director Oliver Hirschbiegel use the killing itself as a starting point in an atmospheric prologue. The production design is spot-on, but Hirschbiegel tries way too hard to create tension, making every occurrence—a record needle dropping, a car door slamming—an unsubtle potential bomb, fraying your nerves like a cheap horror movie. The next two acts are hypotheticals: Little (Liam Neeson) and Griffen (James Nesbitt) almost meet 25 years after the shooting, while taping a BBC program about reconciliation, but Griffen backs out at the last second. This near-brush plays out as a bad one-act play, with internal monologues on both sides; Neeson’s too calmly patrician to convey Little’s real inner turmoil, though Nesbitt’s Griffen is hilariously splenetic. It’s a hell of a show when he goes off, but nothing can be done with lines like, “That’s the trouble with me. I have all the wrong feelings.” Then, finally, there’s the physical confrontation, which plays like a bone-crunching and foley’d-out fight scene from the Bourne series. The three parts never coalesce, even if they all have potential. — Vadim Rizov


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