Brendan Gleeson Dominates THE GUARD. Watch The First Trailer!

[Updated with the trailer now embedded below.]

The favorite thing I saw while in Cannes was not in any of the official selections of the festival. No, it was a picture I caught in the market, one which has made its festival debut earlier at Sundance.

The film is The Guard, John Michael McDonagh's odd couple action comedy pairing Brendan Glesson with Don Cheadle. While it doesn't really do anything new with this particular formula, what The Guard does is bring Brendan Gleeson to the mix while stuffing his dialogue with cheerily non-PC one liners. Gleeson is absolutely brilliant in this and Cheadle's as strong as he's been in years, the pair of them making for one of the most fun cinema experiences I've had in quite some time.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town Irish cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international drug-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door.
 
Boyle drifts through life, not much concerned about anything, not even the mysterious murder of a man in one of the town's holiday cottages. But when Everett shows Boyle the mugshots of four drug traffickers, he recognises one of them as the dead man.
 
And so the two cases converge, with a bemused Everett finding himself adrift in the decidedly original and sometimes surreal world of Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the last of the independents!

The first trailer for this one has just released and while it only begins to scratch the surface of what really makes the film tick it does have a nice moment or two to offer.