THE GUARD directed by John Michael McDonagh (Ireland, 2011)
This black comedy came to my attention by virtue of the fact that the original soundtrack is by Calexico. In the event, this is not one of its major selling points. The music of Joey Burns and John Convertino is more suited to a spaghetti western than a police caper set in Ireland.
The story is essentially a vehicle for Brendan Gleeson as Gerry Boyle a nihilistic sergeant of the Garda (gaelic for ‘cop’) . He has the same droll, cynical manner as he had as the reluctant assassin he played for the film In Bruges, which was , not coincidentally, written and directed by the director’s brother, Martin McDonagh.
Boyle is no longer surprised by how stupid, cruel and corruptible human beings can be. He maintains his own unorthodox code of ethics which means that he sees nothing wrong with tampering with crime scenes, drinking on duty or hiring a couple of hookers on his day off.
At the same time, he refuses to be bribed into turning a blind eye towards a vicious drug gang operating on his patch. A black FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) is flown in to head up a team to bring this gang to justice and the initial slurs Boyle makes against him are defended on the grounds that racism is part of the Irish culture.
Predictably, Boyle and Cheadle eventually form an uneasy alliance in time for a dramatic shoot out at the end,
I expected the comedy to revolve around the contrasting ideologies and methodologies of the Americans and the Irish but McDonagh resists the temptation to go too far down this route. In fact once the jibes and ‘fish out of water’ gags run dry, Cheadle’s role as the straight guy is largely superfluous.
Most of the real fun revolves around Gleeson’s deadpan expression and gallows humour . There are also plenty of laughs in the Tarantinoesque lines of the drug traffickers such as when they are sharing quotes from famous philosophers, reflecting on how creepy Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe is or discussing the difference between psychopaths a sociopaths. Mark Strong as Clive Cornell was my favourite of the three hoodlum; an unrepentant bad guy who finds it “dispiriting” that the police are so easy to pay off.
The plot of this movie is overly contrived to emphasise the small town ‘oirish’ eccentricity but if you don’t analyse it too deeply it works as a piece of mildly subversive entertainment.
