Film Review: The Guard

If The Inbetweeners Movie has failed to peak your interest in the past week, then you still have ample opportunity to seek out The Guard, whilst not perfect (what is?) it certainly provides a healthy alternative to the teen centric, 90 minute fart joke we had the displeasure of seeing (except for the dopey audience who scored it a £21 million opening at the UK Box Office).  Anyway, it would be easy to brand this Irish comedy offering as simply Observe and Report via Local Hero; a deluded beat cop (Brendan Gleeson) on a tiny Irish isle (presumably not too far from Craggy Island, obligatory Father Ted reference ends) is paired with an FBI special agent (Don Cheadle, also sharing a producing credit) in a case involving the hippest drug cartel in modern British cinema (Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong running the show). Luckily though The Guard offers a competent black comedy that’s easily above most of the so called comedy crud we’ve endured this year.

The film is undeniably funny, often hilarious. Ok, certainly measuring this film’s merits over that of The Inbetweeners Movie is like comparing Oscar Wilde to Nicolas Sparks or perhaps symptomatic of desperation in the face of incessant mediocrity. Well, it’s a useful hypocrisy and worth employing in this case, primarily because it allows comparison of common faults. The common fault in question is the ratio between laughs and running time, an uphill battle that most comedies struggle to maintain. Inbetweeners lasted a good 15-20 minutes before burning out due to one note gags, The Guard at least makes up for final act laugh deficiency by attempting to balance out the laughs with some pathos, while this is admirable it feels unsatisfying as we’d rather be laughing. A more appropriate analysis is the fact that the majority of comedies use all their best gags in their first few minutes, and as a result it can only go downhill, thus the films typically shift into lower gear (e.g. ‘emotional’ material) to counter the adrenal crash. Sadly though it’s a do or die deal in movies to suck the audience in the opening moments, a given fact but in the case of comedy it is a thankless one. Now that isn’t to rule out a comedy that successfully diverts into melancholy, the likes of Annie Hall and In Bruges (the director of this film is Bruges director’s brother) establish this fact. The problem is the fact that the premise of The Guard is a retread of the sad-sack cop comedy we’ve seen too often, and prolifically recently (Paul Blart and imitators acknowledged). A worse burden is the baggage that comes with all the tropes of that plot, the ailing mother, drug addiction and unsavoury bad cop antics all show up here, and without much by the way of irony.

In the film’s favour it certainly is a wisely cast film, in particular when we consider Brendan Gleeson as the unprincipled and unapologetically coarse Gerry Boyle. Gleeson is always likeable as the titular guard (or Guarda if you consider the Gaelic locale in the film) and his unrelenting political incorrectness only makes him more endearing. He’s a simple character with uncomplicated motives and naturally faced with an increasingly complicated case, a perfect comic situation. It’s a shame then that the setting is so cliché, but in fairness the movie does counter the generic premise with enough acidity in the laughs to justify the endeavour.