It was supposed to be the easiest win of the decade. You had Harrison Ford, fresh off a string of massive hits, and Brad Pitt, who was arguably the biggest heartthrob and rising serious actor on the planet. Put them in a gritty thriller about the IRA? That’s box office gold. But The Devil's Own 1997 didn’t quite work out that way. It became a legendary example of "production hell," a movie that was basically being rewritten while the cameras were rolling, leading to a public spat that almost derailed the film before it even hit theaters.
Honestly, the drama behind the scenes is just as compelling as the plot on screen.
Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an IRA gunman who witnesses his father’s murder as a child and grows up to be a lethal operative. He travels to New York under the alias Rory Devaney to buy Stinger missiles. Harrison Ford plays Tom O’Meara, a straight-arrow NYPD cop who takes "Rory" into his home as a favor to a friend, totally unaware that his guest is an international terrorist. It’s a classic "clash of morals" setup. But the film’s legacy isn't just about the acting; it's about the friction between two of Hollywood’s biggest egos and a script that felt like it was shifting under their feet every single day.
The Script That Wasn't Really There
You’ve probably heard stories about movies starting without a finished script, but The Devil's Own 1997 took it to another level. Brad Pitt famously trashed the movie in an interview with Rolling Stone before it even came out. He called it a "disaster" and "the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking—if you can even call it that—that I’ve ever seen."
He wasn't just being moody.
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The original draft by Kevin Jarre was a dark, character-driven piece focused heavily on the Irish perspective. But as the budget ballooned and Harrison Ford was brought on board, the focus shifted. Ford is a legendary collaborator, but he’s also known for wanting his characters to have a specific kind of agency. Suddenly, the NYPD cop’s role grew. The balance of the movie tipped.
By the time they were filming in New York and New Jersey, writers like David Aaron Cohen and even Robert Mark Kamen were being brought in to "fix" things. Pitt wanted the gritty IRA drama he signed up for. Ford wanted a moralistic thriller that fit his "good man in a hard spot" brand. The result was a film that feels like two different movies fighting for air.
A Collision of Acting Styles
Watching the movie now, you can see the tension. It’s palpable.
Ford is doing his classic, understated, simmering-with-righteous-fury thing. He’s great at it. He makes you believe that a man like Tom O’Meara could exist—a guy so decent he can't even fathom the level of violence Frankie has lived through. Then you have Pitt, who spent months in Ireland practicing his accent (which, to be fair, is better than most Hollywood attempts, though still a bit "Hollywood"). Pitt plays Frankie with a wounded, boyish quality that makes his cold-bloodedness feel tragic.
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There’s a specific scene where they’re in a basement, and the truth starts to come out. The silence in that room? That’s not just acting. That’s the sound of two actors who were reportedly barely speaking to each other off-camera. Alan J. Pakula, the director who gave us masterpieces like All the President's Men, was the man tasked with refereeing this. It was his final film before his tragic death in 1998, and you can see him trying to steer this massive, unwieldy ship toward some kind of emotional truth.
Why The Devil’s Own 1997 Still Matters Today
Despite the chaos, the movie actually has things to say. It doesn't treat the Northern Ireland conflict as a simple "good guys vs. bad guys" scenario, which was a bold move for a 1997 blockbuster. It looks at how violence begets violence. It looks at the "Irish-American" romanticization of the struggle versus the bloody, ugly reality on the ground in Belfast.
- The Moral Grey Area: Tom O’Meara is a cop who won't even keep a found wallet. Frankie is a man who thinks killing is a necessary tool for liberation. When these two worlds collide, the movie refuses to give you an easy answer.
- The Action: The Stinger missile deal gone wrong is still a tense piece of filmmaking. It’s not CGI-heavy. It feels heavy, metallic, and dangerous.
- The Score: James Horner’s music is haunting. He used Celtic instruments to ground the New York setting in Frankie’s internal world. It’s easily one of the best parts of the film.
Is it a perfect movie? No way. The ending feels rushed, likely because they were still figuring out how to end it while they were filming the climax. There’s a boat sequence that feels a bit too "Hollywood action finale" for a movie that spent two hours being a somber character study. But even with its flaws, The Devil's Own 1997 has a weight to it that modern CG-bloated thrillers lack.
The Box Office and the Fallout
The movie ended up making about $140 million worldwide. On a budget that had spiraled toward $90 million, that wasn't exactly the home run Sony was hoping for. Critics were lukewarm. Roger Ebert gave it a decent review, praising the performances but noting the structural mess.
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But the real story was the "Ford vs. Pitt" narrative. For years, this was the go-to example of what happens when two "Alphas" disagree on the direction of a project. Pitt eventually walked back his harsh comments, chalking it up to frustration and the pressures of the shoot. Ford, ever the professional, mostly kept quiet, though he’s alluded to the "complications" of the production in later years.
How to Re-evaluate the Film Now
If you’re going to watch The Devil's Own 1997 today, you have to look past the 90s thriller tropes. Look at the small moments. There’s a scene where Tom and Frankie are just hanging out in the kitchen, and for a second, you see the father-son dynamic they both desperately want but can't have. That’s where the movie shines.
It’s a portrait of a specific time in Hollywood when studios would spend $100 million on a movie about ideas—even if they couldn't quite agree on what those ideas were.
Actionable Insights for Movie Buffs and Collectors
To get the most out of this film, skip the basic streaming versions if you can and hunt down the high-bitrate Blu-ray releases. The cinematography by Gordon Willis (the guy who shot The Godfather) is incredibly dark and moody. Low-quality streams often crush the blacks and make the night scenes look like a muddy mess.
- Watch for the Willis lighting: Notice how often the characters are partially in shadow. It’s a visual metaphor for the secrets they’re keeping.
- Compare the Accents: If you’re interested in dialect work, listen to Pitt’s Belfast accent. It was coached by some of the best in the business and, despite the flak he got at the time, it’s held up surprisingly well in terms of cadence and lilt.
- Check out the "Alternative" History: Read the original Kevin Jarre script (available on some screenplay archives online) to see the darker, more brutal version of the story that Brad Pitt originally signed up for. It’s a fascinating look at what could have been.
The movie serves as a masterclass in how star power can both save and sink a production. It’s a flawed, beautiful, frustrating piece of work that represents the end of an era for the mid-budget (or in this case, inflated-budget) adult thriller. It’s well worth a revisit, if only to see two titans of the screen trying to find common ground in a script that was changing by the hour.