Michael Flatley never had his boyish enthusiasm crushed by bitter experience. So good luck to him

Last weekend I was one of hundreds of cinemagoers around Ireland who handed over their legit, hard-earned cash money to see a film we pretty much all knew in advance would be one of the very worst we would ever sit through.

That film was Blackbird, starring its writer and director, Michael Flatley, as Victor Blackley, an ageing James Bond-esque secret agent, resident in a tropical gin joint, who is lured out of retirement to … ah, who cares? It was almost a week ago. I’ve forgotten already. Something to do with computer disks.

Even if you haven’t yet seen the former Lord of the Dance’s preposterous vanity project/future cult classic (delete as applicable), you’ve surely seen its risibly clunky trailer: “Who I am is none of your concern ... What I do is out of your control … Who I voted for in the last two US presidential elections … Well, my PR team would rather I didn’t discuss …”

I’ve never relished laughing at people’s missteps. Even when some awful, bigoted politician makes a gaffe that goes viral, exposing their ignorance, I’m too squeamish to watch the video. It’s an affliction

By the time I finally saw the thing, on Sunday night, the reviews were already in. I’d managed to avoid most of them. But Mark Kermode’s comparison of the film to such obscure all-time turkeys as Oversexed Rugsuckers from Mars, Exorcist II: The Heretic, and Sex Lives of the Potato Men had managed to punch its way through to my Twitter feed.

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I’ve never particularly relished laughing at other people’s missteps. Even when some awful, bigoted politician somewhere makes a gaffe that goes viral, exposing their ignorance, I can usually only bring myself to read the transcript. I’m too squeamish to watch the video. It’s an affliction.

So, to be honest, if I hadn’t already agreed to fill in for Patrick Freyne this week, by writing this column, I’d probably have stayed home and given Blackbird a miss. But having gone ahead and seen it in all its glory now, I have to say, I’m glad I did. It really wasn’t that bad.

I don’t mean that technically or, really, by any other known metric.

But if I were to score it against the last film I saw in the cinema for this column (also at least somewhat against my will), which was Denis Villeneuve’s ponderous sci-fi epic Dune, I’d have to say Blackbird really doesn’t come off too badly.

It probably worked in Blackbird’s favour that I was accompanied by my friend Colin. He not only booked the tickets but also brought along a pair of fedoras for us to wear

It was shorter than Dune. It contained a hell of a lot more laughs than Dune. Both films had plots that made about the same amount of sense. There’s a scene in Blackbird where Flatley is shaving his face and he just spaces out for no apparent reason.

I’m not saying that was a good scene. But if Timothée Chalamet had pulled the same move in Dune we’d have been expected to ponder his character’s thoughtful, poetic spirit and beautiful vulnerability. Whereas in Blackbird it was a punchline, albeit an inadvertent one.

It probably worked in Blackbird’s favour that I was accompanied by my friend Colin. He not only booked the tickets but also brought along a pair of fedoras for us to wear. More important still, he decided in advance, on both our parts really, that we were going to enjoy ourselves. And we did.

It especially didn’t hurt that Colin had accidentally bought tickets for the wrong screening, so we turned up two hours early. This meant that, by the time we took our seats, we’d killed a couple of hours in a nearby restaurant, where we polished off a bottle of wine.

Afterwards, Colin only had one question on his mind. What decade was Blackbird supposed to be set in? The characters had modern laptops, but none of them had mobile phones. Multiple calls were placed on old rotary phones. Patrick Bergin spent virtually the entire film in an old British red telephone booth. None of this made sense.

Other kids around Michael Flatley in Chicago probably dreamed of being astronauts or famous ball players. Those aspirations were at least a little bit realistic

I was incredulous. That was the part that didn’t make sense to you? The phone calls!? What about the plot? What about the dialogue? What about the ending? Did Flatley deliberately pull his punches with the finale in order to leave open the possibility of a (shudder) Blackbird 2?

If anything, the question of what year the film was supposed to be set in seemed the least vexing of Blackbird’s mysteries. Whatever year it was when Michael Flatley was 11 years old, I told Colin. That’s when that movie was set.

[ ‘You can’t listen to the naysayers’: Michael Flatley is in flying form at the premiere of his debut film ]

Catching up on the newspaper reviews afterwards, proper film critics (who actually know what they’re talking about) seemed to have latched on to this point too. Writing in this newspaper, Donald Clarke described the trailer as “the sort of film a nine-year-old might dream up in 1972”. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called Blackbird a “12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old boy’s idea of what a secret agent does”.

When people talk about bad art, they often talk about things like the Dunning-Kruger effect, where a novice’s lack of knowledge or skill in a certain discipline causes them to overestimate their own competence.

Or they’ll dismiss something like Blackbird as a vanity project, where the creative “visionary” is also the person signing the cheques, so no one on the production team is in a position to say no to them.

Elements of both of those phenomena are undoubtedly at play in Blackbird. But what I really see is the work of a wealthy first-time director who never had his boyish enthusiasm crushed by bitter experience.

And this is at least somewhat to Flatley’s credit. Maybe not as a filmmaker but as a person. Here is a guy who grew up dreaming of becoming a world-famous Irish dancer. A millionaire Irish dancer.

Other kids around him in Chicago probably dreamed of being astronauts or famous ball players. Those aspirations were at least a little bit realistic. I mean, those things had been done before. His dream was to do something literally no one had ever done — or probably imagined in a million years could be done.

And through sheer hard work and talent he accomplished it.

If I’m ever sitting up late on Christmas night, and Blackbird pops up on TV, you just know I’m pouring myself a glass of whiskey. And you’d best believe I’m dusting off the fedora

Should a man like this really have believed that writing, directing and starring in a low-budget spy thriller was beyond his capabilities? Obviously, as it turns out, he should have. But I’m glad he didn’t.

As for Blackbird 2, that seems unlikely now after the kicking the original received in the press on both sides of the Irish Sea this week. But I’ll tell you what, if I’m ever sitting up late on Christmas night, and Blackbird pops up in the TV schedules, you just know I’m pouring myself a glass of whiskey. And you’d best believe I’m dusting off the fedora.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” I’ll mutter. “And I’m about to sin again…”