One of my favourite movies of recent years was In Bruges, in which Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play two feckless Irish hitmen laying low in Belgium after a job gone wrong. I haven't laughed so much at the cinema since the Dude and Walter went bowling. So I was excited by the prospect of The Guard which sees Gleeson back on familiar territory (and back in his Irish homeland) in a story from the same stable: writer / director John Michael McDonagh is the brother of Martin, who performed those same duties on In Bruges.
Gleeson plays an Irish Garda (police man) with a cynical, anti-establishment attitude and no time whatsoever for the American FBI Agent (a wonderfully deadpan Don Cheadle) invading his patch to investigate a billion dollar drug-smuggling operation. Gleeson is the sort of cop who steals drugs from the pockets of dead joyriders and books prostitutes for the weekend, while also caring for a terminally ill mother (a wry, sly, bone-dry Fionnula Flanagan). It's a tremendous, multi-layered performance and Gleeson gets all the best lines (unlike In Bruges, where Colin Farrell stole the show). Sometimes the western Irish accents were a little too thick for my cloth ears to catch every joke, but there's more than enough to go round and entertaining support from Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot and Mark Strong (who you might imagine would be too big for this sort of villainous bit-part nowadays - but I'm glad he's not).
It's a shame The Guard will suffer in comparison to In Bruges because set against any other recent comedy, it'd come out on top. It's good to see that the first McDonagh brother didn't nab all the movie-making talent... I'll be following them both from now on. Excellent use of John Denver in the closing credits too.
