Netflixis gearing up to add (and take away) a handful of movies and series to its streaming service. From classics created by Alfred Hitchcock to overlooked thrillers from the 1990s, if you decide to have a movie night at home, there’s so much to choose from. One movie that has now found a home on the streamer is Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt‘s intense action thriller The Devil’s Own. While it received a, to put it kindly, mixed response from critics (on Rotten Tomatoes the score is sitting at 37%), it didn’t do too badly at the box office. The film also boasts one of Pitt’s earliest roles, as the Hollywood icon goes toe-to-toe with fellow Hollywood icon Harrison Ford, whose performance was praised.
Brad Pitt was working to become a household name when the film premiered on March 26, 1997. He made appearances in about 21 films before taking on the role of Francis “Frankie” McGuire/ Rory Devaney. In The Devil’s Own, Frankie is a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who travels to the United States to obtain black market anti-aircraft missiles. The task isn’t easy and straightforward, especially when Frankie becomes close with an Irish-American policeman, Sergeant Tom O’Meara (played by Ford). In New York City, Frankie uses the alias Rory Devaney, who O’Meara believes is an immigrant construction worker, while staying with the police officer and his family.
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It has a star-studded supporting cast which includes Margaret Colin as Sheila O’Meara (Tom’s wife), Ruben Blades as Edwin Diaz, Treat Williams as Billy Burke, George Hearn as Judge Peter Fitzsimmons, Mitchell Ryan as Deputy Chief Jim Kelly, and more. The Devil’s Own was directed by Alan J. Pakula (To Kill a Mockingbird, All the President’s Men) and was the Academy Award-nominated director’s final film, as he died a year after it was released by Columbia Pictures. The film’s cinematography was by Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Bright Lights, Big City), who retired soon after.
Harrison Ford’s Conflict With Brad Pitt on ‘The Devil’s Own’
Columbia Pictures
With an $86 million budget, the movie garnered $140.8 million at the box office. Critics wasted no time voicing their opinions about the “conflicting political tones” of the film. Critic Dennis Schwartz called it “an engrossing but disappointing big-budget political suspense film that never becomes exceptional.” Jeffrey Overstreet of Looking Closer gave it an original score of C-, writing, “The line ‘This is not an American story, it’s an Irish one’ means nothing … it is a story as American as McNuggets — all extra-crispy coating and no real meat underneath.”
Harrison Ford was already a veteran actor when Brad Pitt was working to make himself a household name. However, Pitt was supposedly attached to The Devil’s Own before Ford was, and the two had different directions they wanted the film to go in. Ford previously talked about his conflict with his co-star while filming the movie, saying…
“Brad developed the script. Then they offered me the part. I saved my comments about the character and the construction of the thing—I admired Brad. First of all, I admire Brad. I think he’s a wonderful actor. He’s a really decent guy. But we couldn’t agree on a director until we came to Alan Pakula, who I had worked with before but Brad had not. Brad had this complicated character, and I wanted a complication on my side so that it wasn’t just a good-and-evil battle. And that’s when I came up with the bad-shooting thing.”
Release Date
March 26, 1997
Runtime
107 Minutes
Director
Alan J. Pakula
Writers
David Aaron Cohen, Vincent Patrick, Kevin Jarre
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