Waking Ned Devine- (Rated PG for some nudity and foul language)
When I walked into this room I saw a huge mix of people unlike most films I see. I saw myself, a younger man, and then I saw a whole bunch of senior citizens. In most cases this would be the kind of movie, I would skip. I'm glad I didn't skip this little movie about a little village which gets a big surprise that turns the whole town loony.
Jackie O' Shea is a man like many others, he likes to play the lotto. One day there is a lotto drawing and he finds out the winner lives in the small village where he lives. He has an idea to find this person and become buddy buddy with them. He is a very sly, old man. He doesn't know who it is so he has to comb through the 52 people in his village and find the winner. He enlists the help of his best friend Michael to find the winner. While Jackie is looking his wife is trying to find the winner also. It starts to look like Jackie would stop at nothing to find this person.
Jackie figures out that he has checked everyone except for his old pal Ned Devine. When he goes to Ned's house he finds Ned dead watching TV, probably dying from the shock of winning. From here starts a very funny chain of events to try and get this money. The biggest problem is that Ned wrote his name on the back of the ticket so he has to claim the money and he is dead. What are Jackie going to do? He decides that Michael should pretend to be Ned when the lotto people come to give him the money. The lotto person wants to comeback to meet the villagers which forces Jackie to enlist the help of the whole village in this plot for the money.
This movie is so funny. These old men are kind of like little kids. They seem to have no jobs and they spend all their time and energy plotting for this money, mostly Jackie played by Ian Bannen. The other main character Michael, played by David Kelly, is a short skinny old man who had a subtle yet funny and always important presence. One aspect of this movie that was great was that the best two characters in the movie were the main characters. So if they were the main characters then they got the most screentime. In many movies the best characters have too small of a part. This is what I call "The Buscemi Syndrome", named after my favorite actor. He has small roles but makes them great and you would have wanted to see more of him in the movie. In Waking Ned Devine, the best characters had the best roles which is a great job of casting and writing. The acting was great, the direction was not amazing but it didn't need to be. This isn't like an artsy movie with overwhelming cinematography like The Thin Red Line, the main part of this movie was the characters and the acting. I advise this movie as a good comedy for anyone to see. I give it 3out of 4 Stars.