The Guard (2011)

The Guard arrives from 2011, a year when the buddy cop comedy still had enough life in it to be set in Connemara and populated by men who insult each other at length. John Michael McDonagh's debut follows Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Garda officer of elastic morals, and Wendell Everett, the American FBI agent sent to endure him. The pairing is the oldest engine in the genre, and the film runs it hard. Tone is where this one distinguishes itself. It is profane, leering, and unrepentant, which serves as its own kind of statement. A film this committed to offending nobody in particular offends everyone equally, and that is a posture, not a politics.

The casting of Don Cheadle opposite Brendan Gleeson was a modest curiosity for its moment, a Black American federal agent dropped into a white Irish backwater, though the screenplay treats his race as a source of friction between outsider and locals, never as a subject. The locals pretend not to understand English when he speaks, a joke about insularity that happens to carry a racial edge. Elsewhere, a supporting Garda is revealed to be gay, a fact that surfaces only to explain a marriage of visa convenience, and the women of the film amount to a pair of sex workers, an ailing mother, and a Croatian wife with a residency permit on her mind. Nobody asks these figures to carry an argument, and they do not.

The rest of the ledger is thin. There is no environmental conscience here, no body-positive register, no engagement with neurodivergence, and the IRA arms cache in the bog is period furniture rather than historical argument. Corrupt officers and a philosophizing drug baron supply a faint whiff of class resentment, the kind that evaporates by the closing credits. Mostly the film wants to be clever and dirty, and it succeeds at both. It lectures no one, which in an era of cinema that lectures constantly is either a relief or a dereliction, depending on the viewer's appetite for a man in a Garda sweater saying the unsayable with a straight face.