Culture Blues

Tribeca 2011: The Guard

For the next month, Jeremiah and Jeff will be spending almost all of their free time watching and reviewing movies from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's about to get indie up in here!

Go see The Guard ya little shite!

Of the 30-odd films I sat through at Tribeca this year, The Guard is the only one I left knowing that I had to own on DVD.

A blend of dark comedy and buddy cop action, The Guard stars Brendan Gleeson as the curmudgeonly sergeant of a rural Irish precinct, tasked with thwarting the plot of an international drug cartel with the aid of Don Cheadle’s straitlaced FBI agent. Lovably riffing on buddy-cop and fish-out-of-water genre tropes, The Guard delivers in almost every possible way: great chemistry between the leads, a script bubbling with acerbic wit, and a gallery of colorful rogues.

Gleeson shows up huge. His corpulent Boyle – either a complete idiot or a burned out genius, depending on who you ask – is a lovable antihero of the highest order. Carefully developed through snappy exchanges with Cheadle and legitimately endearing visits with his mother (Fionnula Flanagan), Boyle is a one-of-a-kind character that I’d love to see more of. He’s an original for the genre – a cop with philosophical conflicts that manifest at first in apathy and later in doomed existentialism. Gleeson nails the soured iconoclast, anchoring what is such a rare pleasure in cinema: a film I was sorry to see end.

Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother of Martin McDonagh (who directed the similar but inferior In Bruges, also starring Gleeson), The Guard crackles with energy from its opening sequence. Loud, colorful, and consistently funny – the film is simply a blast to watch. If I had to level one criticism in what is otherwise an unrepentant gush of a review, it’s that McDonagh’s convoluted action sequences don’t deliver the punch that the film deserves. Regardless, some mediocre choreography is a small price to pay for a film that otherwise kicks so much ass.

VERDICT:  See it.