General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The General (1998 film)

The General is a 1998 Irish-British biographical crime film written, directed, and produced by John Boorman, starring Brendan Gleeson as the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, who earned the nickname "The General" through a series of daring, carefully planned robberies in the 1980s.¹^•² The film is based on the book by journalist Paul Williams and dramatizes Cahill's rise from the Dublin slums, his cat-and-mouse relationship with the police, and his assassination by the IRA in 1994.³^•⁴ It won Boorman the Best Director prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.⁵

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	John Boorman, from the book by Paul Williams; produced by Boorman³
Subject	Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime boss known as The General, killed in Ranelagh on 18 August 1994, widely believed on the orders of the Provisional IRA⁴
Principal cast	Brendan Gleeson (Cahill), Jon Voight (Inspector Ned Kenny), Adrian Dunbar (Noel Curley), Sean McGinley (Gary), Maria Doyle Kennedy (Frances), Angeline Ball (Tina)³
Visual style	Shot in color but printed in black and white, in widescreen; Boorman's first film depicting contemporary Ireland⁵
Cannes 1998	Best Director award, from a jury presided over by Martin Scorsese; nominated for the Palme d'Or⁵^•⁶
Release and runtime	124 minutes; wide US release 18 December 1998; rated R¹^•⁷
Critical scores	83% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (47 reviews); Metascore 81 on Metacritic, based on 21 critic reviews⁷^•⁸
US box office	$1.2 million⁷

Spoilers

Subject and story

The film opens with Cahill's murder and then traces his life in flashback: a childhood on the hardscrabble streets of Dublin, years in reform school, learning to steal at an early age, and a rise from petty thief to powerful crime boss known for brazen armed robberies, pursued throughout by the tenacious Inspector Ned Kenny (Jon Voight).⁷ According to the British Council synopsis, Cahill grew up in Hollyfield, a Dublin slum where crime was the main occupation; sent to a correction school for stealing food for his fatherless family, he grew up with a deep-seated resentment of all authority and took satisfaction in making fools of the police, the church, and the establishment.²

The turning point in the story is an overreach: Cahill and his gang stole paintings from Russborough House, including the only Vermeer then in private ownership. With public and political pressure mounting, the police instigated a round-the-clock surveillance operation headed by Kenny, a man who admired Cahill but was determined to break him. Cahill, suffering from diabetes, continued to defy and elude them, and he defied the IRA as he defied every other authority. The IRA, which showed none of the police's patience, killed him by gunfire in a public street just before the 1994 cease-fire began.² Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, noted one of the film's most notorious incidents, in which Cahill nails one of his own men to a snooker table to extract a confession, and observed that in real life Cahill's problems came when he interfered in the IRA's drug trade.⁹

Production and premiere

Boorman, a British director who had lived in County Wicklow for more than 25 years, said he felt he had lived in Ireland long enough to make a film about contemporary Ireland; the subject was the life and death of Cahill, killed in Ranelagh on the afternoon of 18 August 1994.⁴ It was his first feature in black and white since his cinema debut, Catch Us If You Can (1965).⁴ The film had a personal connection for the director: Boorman was himself a victim of Cahill's crime wave, and Cahill made off with a gold record Boorman had received for Deliverance.⁷

The General represented Ireland in competition at the 51st Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere and won Boorman the Best Director award.⁴^•⁵ At the Dublin premiere at the Savoy cinema in May 1998, Boorman remarked wearily that so much of the criticism of the film came from people who had not seen it. Gleeson said he had weighed the ethics of taking the role over a six-week discussion with Boorman, concluding that one purpose of the film was to provoke debate.¹⁰

Reception and awards

Critical response was strongly favorable. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls the film "a psychologically rich and darkly humorous piece of gangster cinema anchored by Brendan Gleeson's audacious performance," and the site recorded 83% on the Tomatometer from 47 reviews with an 81% audience score.⁷ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 81, "universal acclaim," from 21 critic reviews, 18 of them positive and 3 mixed.⁸ Reviewers singled out the widescreen black-and-white cinematography; Ebert wrote that black and white emphasizes the characters and the story rather than setting them awash in atmosphere.⁹ The Boston Globe's Jay Carr called it "a gravely beautiful film" about a career criminal who was an anti-authoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a ménage à trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.⁸ Dissenting voices existed: Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly found the film ultimately unsatisfying, arguing that Boorman's romanticization of Cahill kept getting in the way of the reality on screen.⁸

The film's awards record, as cataloged by IMDb, totals 10 wins and 14 nominations: Boorman won Best Director and Gleeson Best Actor (shared with I Went Down) from the Boston Society of Film Critics in 1998, where the film placed second for Best Film; the Evening Standard British Film Awards named it Best Film for 1999; and the Irish Film and Television Awards gave it Best Feature Film and Gleeson Best Actor in a Male Role. It was also nominated for the Cannes Palme d'Or and for three Golden Satellite Awards.⁶

Place in Irish cinema

The General was one of three films based on Cahill's life and death likely to be completed by the end of 1998, ahead of the later Ordinary Decent Criminal; the Irish Times noted that Cahill, assassinated by the IRA in Ranelagh less than four years earlier, had outdone Robin Hood in attracting screen treatments.¹¹ Scholars of contemporary Irish cinema list it among the films of the late 1990s and 2000s in which involvement in crime is treated seriously and affords protagonists a kind of street credibility, part of a broader reappropriation of male-oriented gangster genres within an Irish context.¹² The film also helped put Gleeson on the map in Hollywood, according to a Rotten Tomatoes retrospective review.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026