OVERALL, I really enjoyed the film and was very impressed. Neeson's performance carried it. Historical inaccuracies like the car-bomb were annoying but minor. Neil Jordan did very well with a complex subject and he captured the Dublin street scenes extremely well.
Still, it's really a boy's movie and that is not wholly appropriate as there were a lot of women involved. For example, in an early scene in the GPO in 1916, when we see the rebels surrendering, a man emerges carrying a white flag. In fact it was a nurse, Elizabeth O'Farrell, who carried the flag. Also Jordan overplays Harry Boland's death because he seems to want to build up Collins's relationship with Boland, implying a homo-erotic quality which I think weakens the film.
Kitty Kiernan is not a strong character either. You end up not really caring about her. There is no real sense of her developing romance with Collins. It is true that she was not very politically aware and the film reflects this, but not in a consistent way.
There is a preposterous scene during a speech by Collins when she threatens a trouble-maker with a gun. She never played that kind of role. Most of the time she was in Granard, far away from the action, but in the film she is often shown in Dublin.
The strange thing is Julia Roberts, who plays Kitty, actually looks a lot more like Hazel Lavery, who is left out of the film. She has those big brown eyes and the long nose, just like Hazel.
If we had been shown the Treaty negotiations we could have witnessed Collins's move from guerrilla warfare to the political arena. He changed a lot during those months. He also acquitted himself well at the negotiating table and it was a shame not to have seen that side of him.
If we had seen something of his time in London we would have understood his evolution better. Instead, Jordan concentrates a lot on the War of Independence, when Collins and Boland were rivals for Kitty.
Hazel Lavery was not an old bat as Neil Jordan has described her. Certainly Michael Collins did not think so - he was in love with her. She was not only a colourful society hostess; she was a politically-aware woman in whom Collins could confide. She was integral to his network in London and acted as an important go-between for him with Churchill. She encouraged Collins to accept the Treaty.
In the last week of his life Collins saw Hazel three times. At one stage Hazel and Collins were driving back from a dinner at Horace Plunkett's when the car was ambushed and riddled with bullets. That would have made a very dramatic scene.