The Irish-American gangsters in this bloody neo-noir aren't entirely clear on which is a worse offense between murder or gentrification. That's one of its more appealing themes. Phil Joanou's entertaining St. Patty's celebration reflects its characters' screwy allegiances and brutal deviation from any healthy, normal, or efficient condition. They're extremely inept low-level Irish-American gangsters in Hell's Kitchen, and the reach of their benefit from crime is that raised leases are coercing them out of their neighborhood. They are about to strike a deal with the Italian Mafia, who operate like the British Parliament by comparison. But Oldman's first words to them in the movie are, "The last guinea who walked around up here was Columbus, and he only lasted a week!"<br /><br />This dramatic crime thriller opens with a homecoming. Sean Penn, who used to live in the neighborhood, is back in town, and surprises his best friend Gary Oldman in one of those trashy pubs where gangsters and alcoholics appear to be the exclusive patronage.<br /><br />The Irish gang is led by Oldman's older brother, Ed Harris, who runs the show from his bourgeois house on a residential avenue, far from the botched drug runs that finance his loan agreement. The two brothers have a sister, Robin Wright, who has also tried to escape the neighborhood by working at the front desk of an uptown hotel. But she and Penn's muddle-headed protagonist were once in love. Though the drama seems formulaic, Penn's separate histrionics with each of the three siblings are interesting.<br /><br />Because what is vital to the drama in this forgotten gangster contemporary involves a considerable twist that it not fully divulged till halfway through, I reference carefully, but the most arresting element of the movie is outright, the disconcerted mindset Oldman's perfectly realized character who believes he is somehow Hell's Kitchen's Robin Hood by his murders, arson and other such crimes. Though the disorganized gang's central enterprise seems to be drug dealing, Ed Harris is ready to pull some sideline gigs merely as a public duty. He has Oldman and Penn burn down a construction office on a site for a new white-collar apartment building. The film bears great similarities to Scorsese's superior Irish mob picture The Departed.<br /><br />Gary Oldman's performance steals the film. Sean Penn is an equally great actor, but he has a standard screenplay lead without as much room to build. He has to be reasonable and all torn up with internal strife. Oldman's character is more natural and unadulterated. He acts only on the inclinations of his feral reactions, intolerance, revenge and panic.<br /><br />There are moments in the film that are very disquieting, as when Ed Harris, who normally distances himself from his rackets, finds that he has to himself kill someone he loves. But the movie's plot paradoxically gets less and less original, the more complicated it becomes. At the outset, when it seems concerned only with the behavior of its characters, it's original and challenging. Then it turns into a story filled with familiar elements, and by the end everything is happening by the numbers.