Film Review | The Guard

Brendan Gleeson is like a huge teddy bear – if said teddy bear had been allowed to swig a quart of whiskey while chugging on a cigar as he helped lull your kids to sleep, that is.

He’s one of those actors you instinctively recognise, though you might not know his name. But you would have seen him Braveheart, in Harry Potter… and for a lot of people, the words ‘portly Irishman’ probably conjure up a figure that’s at the very least quite near to the star of John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard – the surprise hit on the season, a home-grown Irish black comedy that’s ostensibly a buddy cop film running on every genre trapping imaginable, but comes with enough heart and charm to cram the chest of our protagonist to the hilt.

Gleeson plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, an unorthodox ‘garda’ watching over the sleepy coast town of Connamara in Galway, Ireland, and largely nonplussed by a murder on his turf, which draws in the FBI’s Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).

But in between using his time off to drink, traipse with prostitutes (Dominique McElligott, Sarah Greene) and take care of his cancer-ridden mother (Fionnula Flanagan), Boyle is drawn into the fray by a trio of trans-UK drug traffickers (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, David Wilmot) after they shoot his new partner, Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), dead. McBride’s Croatian wife (Katarina Cas) seeks Boyle’s help, but to ward off the criminals for good, Boyle will have to – reluctantly – reach out to his new American partner-in-justice.

If nothing else, the film is worth watching for some good laughs. And I mean genuine, belly laughs, not titters or forced bellows at hackneyed gags.

I’m sure there’s a formula to concocting lovably irreverent lines of dialogue, which somehow sound all the better when delivered in ‘charming’ rural-Irish baritones and come laced with an instantly attention-grabbing lack of political correctness (“I thought only black folks were drug dealers… and Mexicans,” Boyle tells the irritated Wendell, by way of introduction)… just like there’s a perfect way to pitch a Hollywood-style slapstick gag, or perfectly barbed, sardonic put-down of the kind the Brits do best.

But the fact is that here, it works, and as with most things, why it works is refreshingly simple: a good script matched with an equally good cast can work wonders. Gleeson and Cheadle are effortlessly convincing, and equally lovable – all the more interesting for the fact that they’re portraying stereotypes.

And where the film could easily veer off into pretentiousness – causal references to Russian literature and giants of contemporary philosophy abound – but it’s done with just enough jaunty silliness to make it work and, crucially, to make it just quirky enough to be endearing.

Of course none of this is really original: neither the plot, nor its twists (though the ending is arguably an exception). And the specific use of Gleeson here could be said to belong to a mini-genre in itself: the writer-director’s brother (Martin) had crafted a very similar light-dark gangster tale with In Bruges, in which Gleeson starred alongside Colin Farrell. But bar the cancer subplot – which is played, in its own way, largely for laughs anyway – The Guard remains the lighter option… and all the more (re)watchable for it.