In 2007, best friends Conor MacSweeney and "Jock" Murphy are a pair of Lower Class Louts from Cork City. Dressing the same and sporting the same bad haircuts and even worse moustaches, they do everything together. After hearing about some bales of cocaine in the sea in West Cork
, they decide to go and try and salvage one to make €7 million quickly.
The film's success led to a follow-up tv series.
This film provides examples of:
- Absurdly Youthful Mother: Mairead was sixteen when she gave birth to Conor, who notes in his narration that she was older than most having a child in their area.
- Alcoholic Parent: Jock's father is perpetually drunk and outright violent towards Jock when drunk, which is always.
- Artistic License – Law Enforcement: Sergeant Healy's superior is supposed to be an Inspector, yet wears the same Sergeant stripes Healy does.
- Axe-Crazy: Billy. His Establishing Character Moment has him demand Conor's phone from him and then headbutt him when he obliges and laugh crazily. Conor describes him as the local nutjob.
- Book Dumb: Conor and Jock both aren't exactly academically bright. Jock claims that he's failed his Junior Cert in spite of the fact that the film is set during the summer and he wouldn't get his results until September, unless he's actually aware of his lack of academic prowess.
- Disappeared Dad: Conor's father died on the job at a construction site when someone accidentally dropped a hammer into his eye socket from a scaffold.
- Dublin Skanger: Best friends Conor and Jock are two teenagers from Cork who dress the same, act the same, and even have the same weak moustaches. Jock is a notorious bicycle thief who plays a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the bike-theft-obsessed police sergeant Healy, and lives with his alcoholic, abusive father. Conor is the son of a single mother, Mairéad, who works for a fishmonger at an indoor food market and with whom he has a strained relationship.
- The Dreaded: Billy's Axe-Crazy tendencies mean that people really don't want to mess with him. Fake Billy's mystique coattails off the real Billy's reputation as well.
- Evil Cripple: Ray is a drug dealer with a very noticeable limp. Having lost the bale of coke to the two lads, he pursues them back to the city, gets hold of a nailgun and holds them hostage.
- Inspector Javert: Sergeant Healy pursues the two lads to West Cork because they stole some bikes.
- Failure Is the Only Option: Conor and Jock eventually find a bale of cocaine by stealing it from Ray, only for the bale to rip on the return journey to the city and the drugs to spill out slowly onto the road as they ride home.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: The two lads are always stealing things. Jock is pretty notorious as a bike thief.
- Knight Templar: Parodied with Sergeant Healy. He's over obsessed with catching bicycle thieves. His boss chews him out for his Skewed Priorities. By the end of the film, he finds a new cause: Getting Jock into a decent home away from his father.
- Latex Perfection: Jock finds an online shop that sells masks of anyone you can provide a photo of. Jock provides a photo of Billy and uses the mask to create his alter ego of "Fake Billy". It's unconvincing in person, but passes well enough on a Garda station CCTV to count as sufficient evidence to raid the real Billy's house, where a large amount of hash plants are found.
- Meaningful Name: Jock's nickname is derived from "jocks", which is Cork slang for underwear. The singular form refers to the fact that Jock only owns one pair of underpants.
- Missing Mom: Jock's mother is not present in the film. The tv series expands on this.
- Nail 'Em: Since getting firearms is tricky in Ireland, Ray gets hold of a nailgun and modifies it to shoot the nails at range.
- Open-Minded Parent: Mairead states she'd be fine with it if Conor was gay and that it would explain a lot.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Conor and Jock end up staying with an old farmer who mistakes them for his sons who have gone off to college. They have to tie him up to stop him from rampaging around the house.
- Shout-Out:
- Conor refers to Sergeant Healy as "a shit Serpico".
- Jock tries to recreate the famous diner scene from Heat with Segeant Healy. Healy just tries to lunge for him instead.
- Ray takes a nail gun from a hardware shop, ostensibly to buy it, but ends up going the Ballistic Discount way instead, except in a non-fatal manner.
- A Simple Plan: Get to West Cork, recover bale of cocaine, profit. Of course, this doesn't factor in that the bale ends up splitting open and the cocaine is spilled out on the entire road back to the city.
- Take Up My Sword: Jock tosses away the Fake Billy mask at the end of the film. A young boy finds the mask and puts it on, implying that Fake Billy will become a Legacy Character.
