Review: Fire in Babylon (12A)****

Don’t be fooled by the double-whammy of this film. It’s a documentary. And it’s about cricket. It’s also one of the most watchable films in recent years.
By Tony Earnshaw
Published 20th May 2011, 11:17 BST

Viv Richards is ostensibly the leading man in this portrait of the West Indies cricket team of the 70s and 80s. And it is he who leads the reminiscences of a band of men who forever changed the world of modern cricket after a humiliating defeat at the hands of their opponents.

The Australians started it when pacemen like Dennis Lillee bowled hard and fast at the Windies’ batsmen.The Windies retaliated with an aggressive form of the game that saw them bowling for the man, not the bat. Suddenly the once genteel gentleman’s sport was transformed into a quasi-gladiatorial spectacle.

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There was a brutal poetry to it all – something Richards, Clive Lloyd and an array of other famous players revel in reliving. There is a swashbuckling aspect to Fire in Babylon which makes it more than just a chronicle of a crucial period in modern cricket. Director Stevan Riley opts to focus his attention exclusively on the West Indies team. It draws together the survivors of that legendary team and elicits from them an unapologetic nostalgia trip down a contentious and controversial Memory Lane. None of the foreign players are given voice in the multitude of talking heads, but there is enough archive footage of those far-off days to satisfy diehard fans.

On limited release