Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Leofwine_draca BORSTAL BOY is a thoughtful prison drama based on the true-life experiences of Irish poet Brendan Bahen. The story is a political and reflective one in which Bahen, then part of the IRA, is captured by the authorities during WW2 and sent to live at a borstal in hated England. While there he discovers that the enemy are not all that they seem and that they might not be so bad after all...Certainly the DVD cover is a piece of blatant false advertising, adorned in barbed wire and featuring a recent photo of Danny Dyer covered in stubble, no doubt from one of his gangster flicks. In actual fact, an incredibly youthful Dyer appears only in support, although his performance as a friendly sailor is a good one. And this isn't your usual tough prison drama at all - although there are elements of the genre here (rape, escape) they're handled in a deliberately sensitive and non-sensationalist way.Throughout the story the human drama is paramount, and thus this proves a fitting reflection of the times in much the same way as a Catherine Cookson TV movie reflects life in the early 20th century north. The only problem I have with it is that Shawn Hatosy's acting is a little wooden.

Rhymer I read the book six times, and couldn't wait to see the movie. I was rather put off at first because so much of the movie is pure fiction. Charlie and Brendan only had one slight spat in their three years together in Borstal, and ended up the best of friends anyway. The young lady in the movie never existed, and much of the rest of the movie was oddly fictitious as well. Charlie Millwall was on the Southampton when it was sunk off of Malta (in the Mediterranean), but I assume they used the HMS Prince Of Wales because they had film footage dealing with the sinking of that ship, and it made a good way for Brendan to find out that Charlie was dead (far more powerful than the scene in the book and the one in the play).Despite all of that, I loved the movie. Brendan Behan did actually say "the English can love people without them being seven feet tall or a hundred years dead." I believe he made that statement because he knew Charlie Millwall so well, and had seen many other good people among the English people with whom he was connected in one way or another. The Warden, Mr. Joyce, was a very good person, and so were many others. I do believe that Brendan Behan had a serious relationship with Charlie Millwall (it's obvious in the book, even though it's never spelled out exactly). I would recommend the book to anyone, and believe that the movie was very good, the fictitious content nothwithstanding. Shawn Hatosy does a very good job in the movie, and Danny Dyer is better yet. Don't miss this movie.

Mark0099 As others have mentioned, the dialog was a real obstacle at times -- I couldn't even tell if the dockside conversation at the end was English or Gaelic. In most any other film, this would have had me at the point of surrender before reaching even the halfway point. But the story shines through here. And while parts are admittedly improbable or inaccurate, this didn't distract one bit. In the shocking final newsreel scene, I was just as distraught as Hatosy's character -- I replayed the scene at least 10 times, each time quite undone its emotional wallop.High marks to Hatosy, Dyer, and Inglesby, whose other work I will now purposefully seek out.

felixoscar Sure, the script sports a contemporary sensibility, but how did this engrossing little gem get lost? Far from perfect, but consider all the trite and dumbed-down stuff that has been exploding on the screen in recent years. The story was more interesting than I had anticipated, I was a kid when Brendan Behan died, my father bemoaning the loss of a talented alcoholic so young.Hard to reconcile the character etched so well by Shawn Hatosy succumbing to a life of alcohol, since the portrait presented, and so well acted, is one of an admirable young man overcoming so much.Charlie, so well played by Danny Dyer, is very interesting, so it would have been more satisfying to have the writers expanding the characters (the story itself takes about 85 minutes).Nevertheless, this deserved far more attention and I rate it, Very good indeed (how about a sequel, set here in the USA)?SPOILERS!!I have no idea whether, as others have wondered, the script is accurate. But one small nit. As man with a double minority heritage (Jewish and Gay) (that's me), I am so damn tired of having sympathy given over to us in on the screen, only to have us bumped off before the curtain falls! Let the bad guys get killed for a change.