The Fundy Film Society

The Guard

The Guard

The Guard is a comedic fish-out-of-water tale of murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and rural police corruption. Two policemen must join forces to take on an international drug-smuggling gang – one, an unorthodox Irish policeman and the other, a straitlaced FBI agent.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is an eccentric small-town cop with a confrontational and crass personality and a subversive sense of humor. A longtime policeman in County Galway, Boyle is a maverick with his own moral code. He has seen enough of the world to know there isn’t much to it and has had plenty of time to think about it. When a fellow police officer disappears and Boyle’s small town becomes key to a large drug trafficking investigation, he is forced to at least feign interest when dealing with the humorless FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) assigned to the case.

A crowd favourite at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, The Guard is a lively and often hilarious Irish crime comedy. Skillfully directed and smartly written by John Michael McDonagh – the brother of In Bruges director Martin McDonagh – The Guard shares a similarly dry and blackly comic sense of humour.

In The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan writes: “The most familiar thing about The Guard is its ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ framing device, with Gleeson’s unconventional Irish police sergeant giving conniptions to a by-the-book American FBI agent coolly played by Don Cheadle. What McDonagh has added to the mix is a great sense of character and place, a plot generous with surprises, and drop-dead sarcastic dialogue that is wickedly comic and unapologetically profane. This is a film in which a killer insists he is a sociopath not a psychopath, the bad guys discuss Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and the local policeman in the Gaelic-speaking Connemara drinks on duty, dabbles in drugs and patronizes hookers who dress like cops in miniskirts.”