Brad Pitt Tempts, but ‘The Devil’s’ Still Too Murky

Young people (girls especially) get Brad Pitt. He’s so cute, so easy to relate to. What many don’t get is the historic political conflict that tangles Ireland.

Add that “The Devil’s Own” is a slow, deliberate thriller, and even the youthful charisma of Pitt can’t save this movie for most kids. Teenagers tended to be confused and bored by it.

“I know there are groups fighting [in Ireland], but I don’t know why,” said 15-year-old William Meadows, from Mission Viejo. “Was [Pitt] in a gang or what when he killed all those soldiers” at the film’s start?

The confusion for William and his girlfriend, Sara Hodges, also 15 and from Mission Viejo, continued when Pitt’s character travels to the States to buy heavy arms for the IRA. Neither was clear on why he had to go all the way to New York for weapons or what he intended to do with them in Ireland.

“I guess they’d be used against the police, but why was his dad killed?” Sara asked.

She referred to a pivotal scene at the beginning in which Pitt’s father is murdered at the family’s dinner table by a masked government agent. It was too murky for Sara and William, as it was for David Pollard, a Lake Forest 16-year-old.

“How can someone just walk in like that” and shoot? David wondered.

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Most youngsters interviewed also were dissatisfied with “The Devil’s Own” because of the grinding pace. Although the creators made what some reviewers have called “a thinking man’s action film,” the film’s tempo left kids fidgeting.

After the movie’s violent opening, nothing much happens in “The Devil’s Own” until the somewhat violent ending. Pitt’s character bonds with Ford’s and his family and has a semi-romantic connection with an Irish woman living in New York. But even the development of those tenuous relationships struck kids as uneventful and ill-defined.

Pitt “was a nice guy, but I didn’t see why everybody liked him so much,” William said.

Sara added: “And he didn’t even kiss his girlfriend. That wasn’t much.”

But the girls enjoyed seeing Pitt do his thing. His boyish smolder is always center-stage, which the girls found very charismatic. And the Irish accent? Just adorable, even with the mumbling.

A favorite Pitt scene for 14-year-old Lisa Shipp of Laguna Hills comes when Pitt goes to a local bar with Ford and plays a mean game of pool, grinning all the while.

“He has really cool hair and eyes,” Lisa decided. “When he smiles, his face is just so nice.”

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The Parent Perspective: Paul McCarron, 36, of Laguna Beach has sons 11 and 13, but he didn’t take them to “The Devil’s Own.” He was worried that the violence would be too much for them. McCarron was surprised, though, that the film was relatively low-key.

“There was some mayhem in the beginning, but the rest of the movie was pretty tame,” he said. “I wouldn’t be uneasy with them here, not really. I think they’d be bored though.”

Sandra Kim, 34, of Laguna Beach took her 14-year-old daughter, Lisa, and didn’t regret it. Kim enjoyed “The Devil’s Own,” even though her daughter was not interested most of the time.

One scene Kim didn’t like was during a warehouse shootout between Pitt and a gang of gun runners.

“That did go overboard and bothered me,” Kim said. “But relatively speaking, this movie wasn’t as bad as some.”