ASthe cartoonist George Grosz and John Hearthfeld fearlessly demonstrated when the Nazis came to power, ridicule is a deadly weapon. John Boorman uses it as a scalpel to lay bare the underbelly of a high-tech, highprice Ireland that has grown rich so fast it's forgotten where it came from and who it is. As well as everything else . . . except perhaps humility or compassion . . . it seems to have a thin skin it disguises as political correctness, if some of the reactions to The Tiger's Tail are any indication.

Boorman takes an archetypal brown-paper-bag property developer, Liam O'Leary (Brendan Gleeson), as the personification of this selfrighteous me-first materialism and confronts him with a doppelganger, a resentful twin brother he never knew existed who turns up out of the blue and wants to take everything he's got . . . his designer wife, his Georgian mansion, his cars and most of all his dodgy company that up to now has every politician in its pocket. Boorman plays out this crisis of identity as a black comedy rather than a factual indictment of the accelerating gap between rich and poor fueled by a high-price property boom through which "the more houses we build the more homeless there are". He sets it in a surreal Dublin of gridlocked traffic, vomiting Temple Bar revellers, coke-snorting teenagers and anarchic emergency wards that make Dante's inferno seem like a rest home. His satirical trick is to take symptoms of social anarchy we all recognise and push them to almost farcical extremes. It works because Gleeson manages to evoke a profound human truth at the heart of his dilemma. By finding himself suddenly on the outside looking in he sees what he has become and, prompted by a sceptical priest who works with back-street down-and-outs (Ciaran Hinds), wonders whether it is worth what he has lost.

In some ways The Tiger's Tail resembles Borat. A bewildered O'Leary, suddenly a stranger in his own world, asks questions that show up the pretences and hypocrisies of everyone he encounters. It's a dilemma shared by many characters in Boorman movies . . . whether the outcast gangster played by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, the city guys trapped in a redneck wilderness in Deliverance, or the two soldiers, one Japanese, the other American, marooned together on a desert island in Hell In The Pacific . . . but this time the mood is dark comedy.

Not everyone seems to appreciate the joke, particularly in Ireland where we'll laugh at anyone except ourselves. Some have accused Boorman of exaggerating . . . which is surely the whole point of humour . . .

others of being offensive, particularly in his depiction of a mental home where the patients, pumped up with pills that make them like zombies, are suddenly released onto the streets because of funding cutbacks. Someone on RTE found "distasteful" a "marital rape" scene in which Gleeson's doppelganger forcibly has sex with his neglected wife who then has an orgasm and coos, "it feels like the first time".

The Tiger's Tail, which is in some ways a companion piece to The General but with a property developer instead of a gangster, is not for the literal-minded.

Boorman doesn't do realism. His movies don't replicate actuality, they are their own actuality. Like Bunuel he finds truth in the extremes of behaviour, in this case using humour as the natural voice of outrage. Some people can take it, others can't. He wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't ruffle feathers.