Johnny Was

About the movie

Johnny Doyle escapes a violent past in Ireland to lie low in London, until his former mentor Flynn breaks out of Brixton Prison, hell-bent on derailing the Irish peace process with a few well-placed bombs. Unable to escape Brixton, they are trapped together in Johnny's anything-but-safe safe house, sandwiched between a Rastafarian reggae pirate-radio station upstairs and a West-Indian 'Yardie' crack-dealing gangster, Julius, downstairs. As the charismatic Flynn finds common ground with the Yardies, Johnny fights to realize a peace process of his own, but makes the mistake of falling for Julius' girlfriend Rita, causing all-out war. A thriller in the vein of 'Lock Stock' and 'The Long Good Friday,' in which questions of race, morality, identity, and loyalty play out against a great sound-track of reggae, rock, new wave, and soul.—Anon