The title of filmmaker Kari Skogland's Fifty Dead Men Walking refers to the number of lives Martin McGartland claims to have saved while working as an IRA informant for the British government between the years of 1987 and 1991. Though 50 isn't a particularly high number when ranked against any film featuring a James Bond or an Ethan Hunt, it's exactly this prejudice that Skogland aims to deconstruct.
Throughout the film, McGartland (Jim Sturgess) sometimes meets with his British handler, Fergus (Sir Ben Kingsley), in a densely populated graveyard, where Skogland makes sure that all the names on all the stone markers remain in sharp focus, creating a macabre picture frame as Sturgess gives Kingsley the skinny on the latest shipment of IRA guns, the next bombing or the next robbery. These moments are a smart, subtle reminder of how enormously meaningful it is to save even one human life, something that thrillers will too often shrug off in service of the higher drama, the bigger gunfight, the more spectacular explosion. As Sturgess is quick to (somewhat selfishly) point out: He hasn't just saved 50 men; he's saved 50 fathers, 50 husbands, 50 brothers. For the real-life McGartland it's a tremendous achievement to be sure, but unfortunately for the film, this theme isn't developed much beyond Skogland's quiet visual observations.
Though ostensibly based on McGartland's autobiography of the same name, the film opens with the warning that some events have been changed in order to properly adapt the story for the screen. Though I haven't read McGartland's book to confirm, this appears to be where Skogland went wrong. Much of the plot has too many of the tidy conveniences of fiction and too little of the knotted, baffling chaos of real life. None of McGartland's personal relationships are developed realistically, and worse still, some of them are even downright cliché.
Added together, all of these script-level problems totally subvert the intent of Skogland's original thesis. The 50 people McGartland saved aren't people anymore. They're characters: Prizes for McGartland to win as he overcomes his personal obstacles, faceless cutouts barely more meaningful in reality than a high score in a video game.
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