Blind Flight

For those of you too young to remember the events it concerns, Blind Flight is a dramatisation of the captivity of hostages John McCarthy (English) and Brian Keenan (avowedly Irish) who were both seized by Islamic fundamentalists in the Lebanon back in the mid-’80s, spending several years at their majesties' pleasure before being released to huge fanfare at home, having been subjected to just about every deprivation and brutality on Allah's earth.
Keenan's return home was especially memorable for a momentous press conference in which he declared his intention to 'make love to all the beautiful women in the world' – and though never quite hitting the heights you suspect its subject deserves, Blind Flight does a supremely good job of evading claustrophobia and boredom, for a movie almost entirely set within five stone prison walls.
Ian Hart, a ginger-haired Scouse actor notable for the frequency with which he is enlisted to play variations on the 'mad Irishman', puts in a generally excellent performance as the volatile Keenan. Though raised a Belfast Protestant, Keenan's identification was unequivocally with the Irish nation, and the early scenes depict his fury at the injustice of his incarceration in a manner reminiscent of any number of H-Block films, with his belligerent resistance to authority providing a striking contrast to his cellmate McCarthy's relatively sanguine demeanour.
Throughout, the pair's liveliness does more than enough to neutralise the potential suffocation factor of the setting – and though the intensely curious are better directed towards Keenan's remarkable memoir An Evil Cradling, Blind Flight nonetheless provides an excellent overview of its subject.

90 mins. Cert – 15PG. Opens February 20