The Devil's Own is a 1997 American action thriller film starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, with Rubén Blades, Natascha McElhone, Julia Stiles, Margaret Colin, and Treat Williams in supporting roles. It was the final film directed by Alan J. Pakula, who died the next year, and the final film photographed by Gordon Willis, who retired soon after. The film was written by Vincent Patrick, David Aaron Cohen, and Kevin Jarre. The plot revolves around a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Pitt) who comes to the United States to obtain black market anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down British helicopters in Northern Ireland. The plan is complicated by an Irish-American policeman (Ford), whom the IRA member has come to regard as family.

Plot

During the year 1972, eight-year-old Frankie McGuire witnesses a masked man shoot his father dead for Irish republican sympathies. Twenty years later in Belfast, Frankie and three other IRA members engage in a shootout with the British Army and undercover agents from the Special Reconnaissance Unit. One gunman is killed and another, Desmond, is mortally wounded; Frankie and his close friend Sean Phelan flee. Frankie's commander Martin MacDuff, seeing a British Army helicopter circling above, decides that the IRA needs Stinger missiles to fight back.