Kill James Bond! - S4E39.5: The Irishman

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

This is a preview of a Bonus episode! You can find the whole thing, as well as our 5-year backlog, on our reasonably-priced Patreon! This week on the Kill James Bond Podcast, we return to the Brains Dojo. The Irishman is Martin Scorsese's sprawling adaptation of I Heard You Paint Houses, a 2004 book detailing the trueish story of Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman who was potentially the guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Set during the long tail of the 20th century, The Irishman conceives of all modern American history as one immense unfolding crime spree committed by backstabbing, self-interested morons. And hey, is that so inaccurate? ----- FREE PALESTINE - With the ceasefire in full effect, the media has returned to ignoring the daily atrocities in Gaza. My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with! -The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ ----- Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the everything app account

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly and I'm joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello, gentle listener. Powerbonger. How are we feeling today, friends? As we embark on a three and a half hour movie. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry.

Listen, we've been doing Fast in the Furious movies for 16 years. This feels like water in the dead. to me to get to do like a really good movie. And unfortunately I picked a really long one. I've also kind of fucked myself specifically because the only way I get time off is to like cram more work into less time so that I've done last week's work this week or whatever. So because I wanted a week off, I'm recording this back to back with Fast 9. I'm making us all do two long recordings and I'm so sorry.

Actually, I liked that this film is as long as it is, and I went into it being intimidated by the length, but then I was like, it's good that it's this long. It's so important that it's this long. Yeah, the longer ones tend to scare me too, but like... It should be this long. Yeah. Yeah. I thought the longer one scared me, but I end up enjoying them more in the long run, so like...

The longer ones always tend to scare me. I think it's more about what you do with the runtime. That's true. That's very true. That's very true. That's very true. what I'm talking about. I feel very similar to the last three plus hour movie you made me watch in starting to talk

about this one. I feel like I've seen a masterpiece and I am ill-equipped to expound on it because I've seen it too recently. I feel like I should have watched this half a year ago to talk about it today. It's beautiful. I'm just going to observe to you that thousands of people pay to listen to your opinions on these things. So you're qualified to do it by dint of that. This is as close to like meritocracy as you're getting. That's the power of the free market, Devon, which we believe in. Yes,

absolutely. Absolutely. Thank God. And the second thing that terrifies me is I'm realizing that this is about history. This is about things that actually happened in real world, which I hate talking about because I don't know anything. I can talk about imaginary shit till the cows go off. In history, we're talking about a little bit of religion. We're talking a lot about masculine. We're talking so much about... We're doing Martin Scorsese's follow-up to silence, mind you, the Irishman. What a three-movie fucking swing, by the way, to do silence into the Irishman, into Killers of the Flower Moon, which is...

Oh, future episode. Yeah. Hell yeah. A perfect fucking film that we will talk about soon. But we are going to have to talk at two times speed to get through this. orders to keep this under like a four-hour recording. So we begin with elderly, elderly Robert De Niro in a retirement home soundtrack to and still of the nights, wearing a big honking gold ring, carrying two canes completely

alone, like in a crowd of old people. Come there, you have two canes. And he tells, he talks directly to the audience, yeah, all to us, yeah. And he tells us the story of his life. He said, you know, when I was a kid, I used to think that painting houses meant literally painting houses because it was autistic. And then I came to understand that it means killing people. Yeah, it's a good first line. It's the title of the book that this is adapted from.

It would have been a better title for it than the Irishman. I heard you paint houses is what's on the title card. That's a good title. Yeah. Yeah. It means killing people because when you shoot people, the blood paints the walls. It splatters the walls. It used to be a...

Mafia hitman is where this guy used to be. Yeah, he was a fella called Frank Sheeran, and we all get to know Frank. And he says, I remember this one particular job that I had to do, and it was me and Joe Pesci from Home Alone and Home Alone, too, had to drive up from Philadelphia to Detroit. It took three days, and our wives came with us. And so begins the kind of framing device of this movie, which is this incredibly long, rambling story told to us about an old man,

about a time he committed to murder. Really an old man. Yeah, and this is in direct opposition to something like Goodfellas, where you have a, like, middle-aged crash out Henry Hill going, ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a gangster, right? In this case, Frank She didn't want to be the Joker. He was just like, as he says, a regular, like, working stiff. He was just like a guy, and then he became a killer, right?

Yeah. And so in the course of, like, we get this framing device of, he is telling us about this road trip, and then in the course of this road trip, he is flashing back again to when he was younger. Yeah. Like late 40s, post-war. And what they've done is they have de-age De Niro and Peshing. Yes. And it doesn't look good.

No, it doesn't. No. I've been on this for a long time, like since it came out, it looks bad. But technologically, it's very impressive, but it looks weirdly unnatural, particularly when they filmed them like in a wide shot, like you get the whole body because they still move like old men. Yes. And there's a particular kind of, there's something about like boomers not being able to let

go in this as well, of like, this has to be Robert De Niro playing a young Roberts Nero. If you, again, I'm gonna be stacking this up against different mob movies throughout. Godfather too, Robert De Niro kind of. in part made his career off of playing a young Marlon Brando, right? And he did a fantastic job. Yeah. There are any number of great actors who could have done young De Niro now. It would have been good to see it.

I love it when you see a younger actor play like a famous older writer. It's good. It doesn't look good. Everyone looks like they're fucking Instagrammed. The lower P that you watch this in? I will expound my thoughts soon. The lower P you watch this in, the better it looks. Yeah, yeah, it's something, there's something about this where it's like, it has a kind of like

old man's hesitation about it, and I mean that in the direction too. That's both a praise and a criticism, where it's like, no, I want to keep working with the guy I've been working with for 40 years, because I know them and we know each other, and like, I want to keep having that kind of relationship, because I don't trust myself to, to give it to a new actor, and it's like, that has cost and benefits. I think there's like some ways that, although it looks bad, I think, thematically, it kind of works, but we'll get into that. I agree. I agree. You most assuredly could have cast a younger actor to play young De Niro in this, but they don't. We'll talk about the choice soon.

Young De Niro is a truck driver. I will know. Before we get to the flashback, the car journey that they are taking, the first thing we know about it is that it is taking a fucking age. This guy, this Russ Cun, I don't know anything about him yet, is insisting that they stop and smoke outside of the car. So it's just this like long, fucking slow journey upcountry. And their wives keep wanting to just fucking smoke, so they have to just pull over every few minutes.

Exactly. Then we go back. Back in the day, Robert Zanera young, Roberts Nero was a truckman. He was. One thing that's gotten worse about society is that they don't make truck drivers

wear the Tom of Finland's leatherman cap anymore. But they used to. They don't. They don't. This is what Luke Evans was doing. That's why he couldn't be in Fast 9. And his truck, his truck breaks down on like the highway. And so he pulls into a service station.

And as he's trying to fix it, Joe Pesci, young in heavy air quality. Young. Instagram, Joe Pesci. They both look 40 here. It's crazy. Young Joe Pesci like helps him. He like fixes the truck. And he won't tell him his name, right?

He's friendly, but like he won't. He won't tell him. And as Frank Sheeran, De Niro's character says, you could tell he owned something. So I thought he owned the service station. Turns out he owned the road. Yeah. He just sends him on his way. One thing about this, by the way, is that there's a lot of comedy in the Irishman, and

one of the things that Scorsese finds funniest is miscommunication. And there's a lot of really, like, dumb guys talking. I love, yeah. It's so fun. Yeah, Shearin goes to this bar because he asks him where he hangs out in Philadelphia and Shearin says, botchy club, but it's the name of a bar, it's not a botchy club, and immediately Russ, Joe Pesci misunderstands him and goes, oh, you play botcha? You play botch?

It's just like, two kind of dumb guys talking past each other as the funniest thing in the world to Martin Scores. I think they over-relii on this a little bit later in the movie. I'll kind of agree, yeah. But anyway, so he goes to this bar and Robert DeNere, he delivers meat, he delivers beef, and he hangs out in the bar, and he gets introed to this, like, mobster Frazier, I think, his name is. Guy I remember from Boardwalk Empire, yeah.

His friend is like, oh, this is my buddy, the guy I told you about, he's the guy with the weird CGI face parts. It's like, oh, yeah, bit of him. Yeah. Yeah, an old Johnny Young face, we call him. He's a man out of time. He's walking around, like, fucking fragile. He's got an old woman's body.

Johnny the Pixel Johnny the Pixel And Bobby Canavale is sawing on the toughest steak You can imagine And Frank sees an in And so he's like You know I could deliver a steak for you Maybe

I deliver a steak You know I'm a steak delivery guy I drive the fucking trucks With steaks into places I could start doing crimes For you I could drop a steak off Yeah maybe one of those like sides of beef Could get lost along the way

And so maybe it might fall off the back You know Skim a little off the top He delivers him a little stake here and there. And this escalates and escalates until we see him one week. He delivers a purely empty truck to the other end. And the guy at the other end is like, look, man, you're bullshitting me. Like, I know you've been skipping a little bit, but like, this is ridiculous.

This is great. It's so good. But Frank doesn't do a thing. He's like, no, that's crazy. I don't know. He opens up the back of this completely empty truck. He's like, what do you want me to do? I'm telling me.

I don't know. I just drive the thing. He says, don't look at me. And the guy's like, of course I'm going to look. You're the only guy here with a fucked up CGI face. Like, everybody within 50 blocks is looking at you, man. Like, you didn't realize you were driving a truck that was empty. And he goes, I know, I don't know.

I don't know. Smash cut to him talking to his mob lawyer. He's talking to a mob lawyer. And the mob lawyer issue is a classic thing. He goes like, listen, all you'd need to do is name a couple of names. Would you be willing to do that? No, no names. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, no, no, I definitely wouldn't do that. And they were like, that's the right fucking answer. Well, done. Yeah, yeah. He also, Robert Deereo gets a fun line in here and he says, well, I work hard for the meat delivery company when I'm not stealing from them. Yeah, exactly. I've moved that meat.

Yeah, I just steal a little. We see the mob's power because this lawyer, Bill Buffolino, he like, not only does he get him off the case which he should have been in prison for. He Bufelinos them. But the, but the judge. is like, I'm gonna let you off with a warning. No, no, not you, the prosecutor, right? And like, sort of goes,

if you bring another, like, working man before this court and you just go, oh, this guy's on the take, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really fun. All I'm doing is going, Mr. Buffalino, Mr. Charles Buffalino in my head. They go out to celebrate and who should be in the restaurant, but Joe Pesci, who it turns out is the cousin of his lawyer. Yeah, and he's having dinner with husband. Lavi Kytel who is wearing the big fucking gold ring that we saw old Frank wearing and

who Frank immediately identifies to us as the godfather of Philadelphia. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Also, the other thing he's wearing is a title card that pops up saying Harvey Kattel's character was murdered in real life in 1980. And I'm like, I hate it when I'm having dinner room that appears. This is one of the best things in the fucking movie is this constant when a character is introduced, it pops up on them when they died. Because these are all historical guys.

They all were killed. So it just said, like, there's a bit later on, we'll get to it, but there's a bit later on where they introduce a guy and he's like doing all this slick bullshit and then immediately cuts up shot eight times in the head in the Chicago parking lot in 1979. Yeah, it's like, how do you get that way? Every time, it's so good because it's always, it always serves to underline that this is a pointless fucking thing to get involved in and you will die. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's really nice actually. It's like, oh, we all want to be like this guy, and it pops up like, shot in the herd.

Yeah, all their power and masculinity will all be taken away. This is a theme of the movie as well, is Martin Scorsese having made a bunch of mob movies that people do not, do not know how to watch. They don't get. No one gets them. Is finally conceiving to the times and actually putting in the intended emotion frowny, face in the corner of the screen. You are not supposed to want to be this guy. He dies. He dies bad.

This is a guy at the height of his game, putting his thumb on the scale as hard as he dares to, genuinely being like, the mafia is bad. You don't have to hand it to them. It's not aspirational, right? It's really funny to have just given up at this stage and just be like introducing a guy and then just being like, you don't want to be like him. He feels like he's drowning the whole time and then he gets shot.

Stop wanting to be here. Just to underline it even further, we get this conversation between Robert De Niro and Joe Peschi where they talk about the war. Yes. And they flash back to a scene where Robert De Niro is forcing two Nazis to dig their own graves before he shoots him in the words.

And he says, I can't understand why they kept on digging their own graves. And it's like, you are in the movie. You are in the movie. He says, I get. Yes, they think that if they do a good enough job digging, the guy with a gun will change his mind. And that's just, that's your like, m-lens to understand the whole fucking thing. Yeah, now hold on a minute here, see? If you want to hear the rest of this episode of Kill James Bond, you're going to have to do something for me.

You're going to have to go to patreon.com slash kill James Bond, all one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds of, I'm stopping. The accent's gone. But, you know, you've got to do that. the five pounds a month thing you do have to do it yeah yeah and i'm just going to put this on the episode and release i think awesome