In a new series, acclaimed filmmaker Paul Duane celebrates his favourite Irish cult movie classics...
ACCELERATOR (Director Vinny Murphy, 2000)
What is it? Accelerator tells the story of an illegal road race, in stolen cars. from the Pope's Cross in the Phoenix Park to the heart of Belfast, with the winner getting a cash prize put up by all the competitors, a varied bunch of gangsters, psychos, drug users and dealers, all of them trying to avoid the cops, the army and the paramilitaries with varying degrees of success.
Why is it important? Genre cinema in Ireland rarely seems rooted in an actual understanding of what Irish people are like, how we speak, act and behave. Often it feels like Irish actors going through the motions of Hollywood templates. Accelerator has the rhythm of Irish working-class speech, humour, tenderness and toughness mingled together. The characters feel real, because they’re mostly young actors drawn from real working-class areas themselves. Then there’s the score – Brian Eno, one of Portishead and David Holmes come together to create a rave-generation road-trip buzz. The soundtrack album still turns up on eBay the odd time.
How did it get made? UK & US money combined with Irish Film Board funding, and a lot of ingenuity on the filmmakers’ part in figuring out how to do a road movie with proper stunts on a tiny budget.
How did it go down? Variety weren’t too crazy about the 'heavy Irish accents’, while Aint It Cool, the arbiter of what was and wasn’t cool in the noughties, called it "the film Gone In Sixty Seconds should have been" and RTÉ Entertainment's review said it had ‘cult hit skidded all over it’, which has turned out to be true - the unofficial upload on YouTube has 1.3M views. Young Irish audiences have taken it for their own.
What should have happened? The director should have made his cherished follow-up, an adaptation of the greatest Irish novel of the past fifty years, A Goat’s Song by Dermot Healy, and had a long career as a working-class Irish auteur (something we’re still desperately in need of), possibly leading to more filmmakers emerging from Dublin’s more impoverished neighbourhoods.
What happened instead? The film had a festival run, before various issues resulted in it only having the smallest of UK and Irish releases, and zero international presence. Director Vinny Murphy continues to make documentaries based around the people of working-class Dublin suburbs like Fatima Mansions and Jobstown, and to mentor the new generation of Irish actors (including Paul Mescal) coming out of The Lir Theatre School. The film currently isn’t streaming legally anywhere.
Enjoy more Irish cult movie classics here.
