THE GUARD
Written & Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Produced by Chris Clark, Flora Fernandez-Marengo, Ed Guiney & Andrew Lowe
Written by Patrick Dewitt
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Ireland. 96 min. Rated R
With Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, Rory Keenan, Mark Strong & Fionnula Flanagan
 

A curmudgeonly, self-aware take on the buddy cop genre, The Guard is another indie flick struggling in the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino. Although modest fun can be had soaking in Brendan Gleeson’s note-perfect portrayal of a larger-than-life, small-town Irish copper, everything else about John Michael McDonagh’s directing debut feels half-baked.

The guard in question, Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), holds down the law in Connemara, a sleepy, bleak town in western Ireland. He’s honest in his own way. Sure, he romps with Dublin whores and has shady IRA connections, but he’s not on the take. When we meet him, his quiet, mildly sinful life is changing. His mother (Fionnula Flanagan), his only family, is dying.  And his little town—the kind he half-boasts, half-complains is too peaceful—is rocked by a bizarre murder. 

The killing, it turns out, is a prelude to a major drug deal: a trio of fugitives have arrived in Connemara to rendezvous with a boat stuffed with half a billion dollars worth of heroin. Soon, Gleeson’s partner, a Boy Scout-like paragon of virtue, vanishes, leaving behind a distraught Croatian wife. To help with the drug bust, the authorities have called in the Americans, specifically, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), a by-the-books FBI agent.

Of course, Boyle and Everett immediately clash. But they have a journey to undertake—one of the most storied in all cinema—where the black cop and the white cop, one uptight and trim, the other fleshy and roguish, follow the oft-beaten path from confused hostility to grudging respect, and arrive, just in time for a climactic shootout, at affectionate friendship.

To be fair, the movie isn’t really interested in all that business, and staggers through the undercooked plot as if in a trance, practically sleepwalking through that inevitable final shootout, one so clumsily staged it could have been made for Miami Vice. (The TV show, that is, not Michael Mann’s ultra-granular 2006 reimagining.) The film also tries to critic-proof its weaknesses, pretending that it knows it’s all a pile of clichés but doesn’t give one ripe fig. Near the end, a boy even asks Everett if he’s going to write his memoirs about his time in Ireland, saying it’ll be perfect for Hollywood—“You know, a fish-out-water story.”

So, never mind that. What The Guard is really all about is Gleeson, and rightly so. His Sergeant Boyle is a deft characterization, seemingly a coarse, racist numbskull, but who’s really just taking the piss out of everyone. And he pulls off some deadpan, viciously un-PC quips. After recovering a cache of weapons in a bog, he tells a boy a little pistol they found was used for “shooting little Protestants.”

The more serious problem with The Guard is, like Tarantino’s films, it exists in an alternative world where everyone has the same obsessions as the director. Whether it’s a little crackbrained street urchin or a hardened drug dealer, the common currency of every conversation is the surprising factoid. Maybe I’m being a scold, but does anyone want to watch a movie where 11 year olds and drug dealers talk like Jeopardy contestants? Even with Tarantino, this shtick rarely works. In Inglourious Basterds, a movie I liked, the dorky ego projections—Michael Fassbender’s handsome and suave film buff-spy, Daniel Brühl’s handsome and sensitive film buff-war hero—were the worst parts. But Tarantino more than made up for this with some truly smart filmmaking (for instance, the tavern scene).

Here, we’re just soaked through with gimmickry and quirkiness. When we meet the head of the heroin-smuggling trio (Liam Cunningham), he’s hunched up in the backseat of a car reading Schopenhauer. Then, he and his two chums (David Wilmot and the screen’s favorite reigning heavy, Mark Strong) have an impromptu contest to see who can come up with the most obscure Nietzsche quote, because what’s funnier or more surprising than narcotraficantes who are also into German philosophy?

Throughout, you can sense a bright high schooler’s eagerness to be thought smart enough, a kind of ersatz literariness. At one point, we even see a close-up shot of the Penguin Classics edition of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. It must be the oddest product placement you’ll find in cinemas this summer. Brendon Nafziger
July 29, 2011