FILM REVIEW The Guard

THE ODD COUPLE Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson star in The Guard.


An arresting Irish western


Cinema
Daniel Carey

“YOU want to know what my job is like?” New York policeman Edward Conlon asks in his memoir ‘Blue Blood’. “Go to your garage, piss in the corner, and stand there for eight hours.” Conlon’s pithy summary wouldn’t be out of place in ‘The Guard’, the new comedy-thriller written and directed by John Michael McDonagh.
Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a disgruntled cop based in Irish-speaking Connemara. He’s long enough on the job to know that waiting to catch a drug smuggler isn’t “exciting”, as a younger, naïve colleague puts it, but involves long hours waiting at the pier in Rossaveal.
Gerry is an unconventional policeman. He drinks on duty, and occasionally plays arcade games while wearing his uniform. He hires prostitutes. He takes a day off in the middle of a murder investigation because he believes that “24 hours won’t make any difference” in solving the case. And he questions the “street value” of cocaine by saying to his garda colleagues: “I do always wonder what street it is you’re buying your cocaine on, because it’s not the same street as I’m buying my cocaine on.”
But after discovering a body in a holiday home, the small-town sheriff in this Irish western finds himself on the trail of some international drug smugglers, with FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) for company.
Wendell can’t work out if Gerry is ‘really dumb’ or ‘really smart’, and the viewer is similarly unsure whether he’s full of BS or not. This plain-spoken Irishman claims to have come fourth in a swimming race at the Seoul Olympics, openly admits he has no interest at pictures of his colleague’s children (“babies all look the same”), and disrupts his African-American visitor’s address to Galway policemen by asking: “I thought only black lads were drug-dealers!” But it’s clear that there’s more to Gerry than meets the eye.
There’s a knowingly cinematic air to the whole enterprise, and some good laughs are drawn from Irish impressions of American cop shows. Wendell is flabbergasted to be asked – by a garda, no less – whether mafia threats to “liquidate” enemies actually involve turning people into liquid!
Martin McDonagh, brother of the director, serves as executive producer, and there are some strong echoes of his 2008 ‘In Bruges’. “This is the pay-off,” Mark Strong’s drug-dealer tells a crooked cop who’s a bit slow on the uptake, echoing Ralph Fiennes’ casual “This is the shootout” comment in Gleeson’s last McDonagh movie.
Quentin Tarantino’s influence is clear too – another attempted bribe occurs in an Eddie Rockets restaurant, a scene that will remind many of the 1950s-themed restaurant where Uma Thurman and John Travolta danced in ‘Pulp Fiction’.
Even the minor characters are well drawn, and there are some strong performances among the supporting cast, which allow McDonagh to display the family flair for dialogue. Fionnuala Flanagan shines as Gerry’s dying mother, who could “do with some cocaine” and jokes with him about an orgy. Young MicheΡl Óg Lane plays a quick-witted kid who replies “heroin” when asked by Gerry what he was doing near an isolated arms dump.
Pat Shortt, sporting a cowboy hat, confirms the presence of “gay lads” in the IRA – “It was the only way we could successfully infiltrate the M15,” he tells Gerry. David Wilmot, one of three fugitives, explains that he’s “a sociopath, not a psychopath – they explained that to me in Mountjoy.”
It ain’t very PC, but it is very funny. ‘The Guard’ is a very promising directorial debut. More please.

Rating 8 out of 10