Intermission (film)

A raucous story of the interweaving lives and loves of small-town delinquents, shady cops, pretty good girls and very bad boys. With Irish guts and grit, lives collide, preconceptions shatter and romance is tested to the extreme. An ill-timed and poorly executed couple's break-up sets off a chain of events affecting everyone in town. There's the hapless romantic and his sex-starved best friend, the hotshot detective and the crook he's after, a young girl on the rebound with an older married man — not to mention his deserted wife, an ambitious TV producer, an abandoned fiancée, a preteen trouble-maker — all of whom are unaware of how their choices are profoundly intertwined. Add a botched robbery, some brown sauce, a woman's moustache, flying rocks and dancing single seniors and you have interMission.

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Tropes exemplified by this work include;

• Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male: Averted when Oscar walks out on Noeleen after she gets too rough in bed. Then played straight after this steels her to dish out a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on her husband, in the middle of his being an accessory to a bank robbery. Which is actually funny as hell.
• All-Star Cast: Colm Meany, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murpy are he three main leads.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Jerry Lynch's policing style
• Attention Whore: Jerry
• Bad Boss
• Beard of Sorrow: Rare possibly unique female example - Sally, traumatised by an abusive relationship. "She's got a moustache! Whatever she was doing before, waxing, or shaving - she's stopped"
• Beauty Inversion: Except for Deirdre O'Kane everybody's pretty scuzzy, and Shirley Henderson sports a moustache.
• Black Comedy
• Brick Joke: The kid who throws a rock at the bus, causing it to crash, does the same thing to the Bad Boss in the ending.
• Broken Bird: Sally
• Christmas Cake: Noeleen
• Cowboy Cop / Old-Fashioned Copper: Jerry Lynch
• Crosses the Line Twice: Three times, really; the scene where Sally is finally coaxed into describing her traumatic relationship goes from disturbing to funny to Nightmare Fuel. She was Chained to a Bed and beaten... and then the guy took a shit on her chest. And then, he left her there until she was found three days later.
• The Documentary: On The Streets With Jerry Lynch
• Drink Order: Becomes a plot point. John takes to putting brown sauce (think ketchup with malt vinegar and molasses) in his tea, and when his co-conspirators try it out of morbid curiosity they find it delicious. Later on Lehiff asks his hostage for one, and she realises he must know her ex boyfriend.
• Epic Fail: The bank heist.
• Establishing Character Moment: the opening scene, which shows us that Lehiff is charming, a thief, and not afraid to Hit A Girl.
• Fake Irish: Deirdre and Sally are played by Scottish actresses Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Jerry's favourite style.
• The Heist: So utterly failed that it barely even registers in he plot.
• Hey, It's That Guy!! Moaning Myrtle is a Broken Bird with a Moustache of Sorrow, and Jonathan Crane is dating her sister.
  • And Chief O'Brien has joined the gardai.
• Kingpin in His Gym: Jerry and his punching bag.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: John, who stole ridiculous amounts of stuff from the supermarket in which he works. One time, he stole an entire crate of brown sauce. When he finds he can't get rid of it quickly enough, he starts putting it in his tea.
• My Nayme Is: the film is called interMission. If anyone can figure out how to make that work as a page title, go to it.
• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: Sally.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Jerry: "I'm a thug. Basically my only humanising quality is my love for Celtic Mysticism."
• Sexual Karma: Oscar and Sally, the two shy ones, find each other. John gets his girlfriend back when he admits that he cares about her. Sam gets back together with his wife, who's discovered she can use threats of physical violence to keep him in line. All together now - awwww.
• Something Only They Would Say: tea with brown sauce is not the world's commonest Drink Order.
• Sophisticated As Hell: "That makes you, and I feel no compunction in saying this, a whore"
• Stupid Crooks
• Twice Shy: Sally and Oscar.
• Would Not Hit a Girl: Both this and Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male are zigzagged all over the place. First, in the opening scene, Lehiff is charming a waitress when completely out of the blue he socks her in the jaw and knocks her to the ground. Later, John is furious when he treats Dierdre the same way. And on the other hand, Noeleen hitting Oscar causes him to walk out on her, but this inspires her to take out her frustration on her husband, which is Played for Laughs.
• Your Cheating Heart