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Baltimore

Baltimore

  • Status: Released
  • 01-03-2024
  • Runtime: 98 min
  • Score: 5.6
  • Vote count: 24

Based on actual events that took place on 26 April 1974, former debutante turned IRA member Rose Dugdale and three comrades carried out an armed raid on Russborough House, Wicklow, in which nineteen masterpieces were stolen in an effort to support the IRA’s armed struggle. The film plays out over the course of the days following the raid, when Rose is in hiding in a remote cottage.

Imogen Poots

Rose Dugdale

Jack Meade

Eddie Gallagher

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor

Dominic

Lewis Brophy

Martin

Dermot Crowley

Donal

John Kavanagh

Sir Alfred Beit

Andrea Irvine

Lady Beit

Flynn Gray

Patrick

Carrie Crowley

Rose's Mother

Simon Coury

Rose's Father

Vanessa Ifediora

Alice

Patrick Martins

Walter

Martha Breen

Sophie

Molly Rose Lawlor

Lizzie

Conor Lambert

Fisherman

Michael-David McKernan

Micheál

Jude McClean

Child Rose

Paul Ward

Butler

Fionnuala Murphy

Shopkeeper

Alan Howley

News Reporter

Ciaran McMahon

Policeman

Simon Kunz

BBC News Reader

Ciaran McKenna

Albert Price

James Edlin

Boy's Father

Ella Cannon

Comrade

Derek Carroll

Garda / Special Branch

Bernadette Carty

Anne

Damien Donnelly

Garda Special Branch (Black Trench Coat)

Kilmurry Jennifer

Oxford Student

James Sadat

Oxford Union Member

CinemaSerf

Compelled to be presented to the Queen as a debutante in return for an Oxford University education, Rose Dugdale (Imogen Poots) rebels from a fairly early age. Her privileged upbringing - as so often happens - leads her to detest the very hands that fed her in her childhood. Meantime, the troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s are only increasing and after a trip to a training camp in Cuba, she returns a fully capable, bomb-making, terrorist - with a brain and a conscience. A plot is devised to rob a stately home of some valuable Goya, Rubens and Vermeer paintings and hold them as hostage for £500,000 and the freedom of two hunger striking IRA prisoners incarcerated in the UK. What now ensues is a rather weekly constructed speculation as to just how this shrewd plan was executed and of the aftermath. The story is an interesting history - but with the timelines dancing around all over the place and the performance of Poots a bit hit or miss, I found the pace of the film too bitty. We are all too often left dangling when a storyline is being developed and talking of development, there is very little to inform us about who the real Dugdale was. The screenplay doesn't shy away from describing the radicalisation here nor of some of it's concomitant brutality but somehow her vitriolic detestation of the British state is left completely unexplained. This subject could make for a strong political documentary on a woman who was clearly dedicated to her cause, but as a drama - this doesn't ever really engage.