The Guard – review

Marlene Dietrich said of Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil that he was "a great detective but a lousy cop", a judgment that could equally be applied to Brendan Gleeson's corrupt but deeply lovable Connemara policeman, Sergeant Gerry Boyle, in John Michael McDonagh's The Guard . This lively comedy-thriller is the latest example of that very knowing genre, the Irish crime movie, whose greatest peaks to date also star Gleeson: John Boorman's The General , and In Bruges , written and directed by McDonagh's brother, Martin. It's an amalgam of In the Heat of the Night , The Quiet Man and Pulp Fiction telling the not wholly plausible tale of a combined anti-narcotics operation between the FBI and the Garda on the west coast of Ireland that brings together sly, slobbish, boozy, faux-racist Gerry Boyle and efficient, uptight federal agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), an African American Ivy League graduate and Rhodes scholar. The dialogue suggests a group of writers, Pinter and Mamet among them, working under the joint pseudonym of Quentin O'Tarantin. Everyone between Limerick and Sligo appears to be a serious movie buff. Between killing people, the three drug barons (one of whom, an East Ender, is called Cornell, presumably as a tribute to the Kray twins' friend and victim) discuss the contributions to philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Russell. Gerry and his dying mother talk about Russian literature, and she leaves a final message tucked inside her copy of Oblomov . An exegetic argument about Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe" between Gerry, a gangster's moll and the chief drug dealer could have come out of Reservoir Dogs , or Tipperary Terriers as they might well call it out there. When the climax comes, it's a spaghetti western with Kalashnikovs instead of Colts to the strains of pastiche Morricone. Great fun when taken in the right spirit, which would be Old Paddy with a Guinness chaser.