I love going into movies knowing as little as possible about them. All I knew about The Guard is that Don Cheadle plays an FBI agent. I didn’t know if it was a drama or comedy or that the first two minutes of it would be more entertaining than most of the movies I’ve seen in the past year.
From the moment this film opened, I felt like it was written to me. Well, specifically 22-year-old me. N.E.R.D.’s thumping “Rock Star” opens the movie, pumping up the audience and taking me right back to the early 2000s. The song ends with a dark, hilarious surprise that I won’t give away, but perfectly sets up The Guard‘s sensibility. The opening credits hadn’t even started and I was 100% on board.
The fact that it takes place in Galway, where I briefly studied film as part of a semester study abroad program and attended the excellent Galway Film Fleadh, was just icing on the cake. The Guard, which incidentally just won the Best Irish Feature award at the Fleadh, is a shining example of what Irish cinema can be. Dark humor, biting wit and the ability to switch emotions on a dime — taking you from uprorious laughter to deep, Irish bottom-of-the-bottle sadness.
The premise of The Guard is gimmicky, but intentionally so. Don Cheadle is an FBI agent who comes over to Galway to investigate a drug trafficking operation. Brendan Gleeson (aka “Mad-Eye” Moody) is Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the local cop who ends up helping Agent Everett (Cheadle) out. It goes without saying that this is a pair of opposites: Everett is clean-cut and privileged, while Boyle is a drunken, blue-collar lout.
Writer/Director John Michael McDonagh does a brilliant job of simultaneously staying true to the American black/white buddy cop convention and poking fun at it. Instead of dancing around the race issue with a lot of winking and nodding, McDonagh attacks it head on, with lines like, “I thought only black lads were drug dealers … and Mexicans,” peppered throughout the film.
Even though The Guard is often hilarious, the hilarity often gives way to tragedy. Beatings, murders, suicide; no one is safe in this film. While the comedy and the tragedy often strike the audience in the face, it’s the quiet moments that stick with you. The best come from Boyle’s interactions with his mother, played by Lost‘s Fionnula Flanagan who faces death with a strength and humor that grounds Boyle’s more outlandish behavior.
The performances are all spot-on and the writing is fast-paced, but The Guard will undoubtedly have some trouble finding an American audience. The accents aren’t the lilting Lucky Charms accents that to which we’ve become accustomed — they’re the thick, gritty small-town Irish accents that have spent generations speaking Gaelic. Hopefully Don Cheadle and the addition of a couple of folks from London and Dublin will be enough to make The Guard feel accessible to the average audience member.
I was hooked before anyone even said a word.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Aug 12, 2011 @ 00:08 EST5EDT
