I can, without reservation, say that Brendan Gleeson's performance in writer-director John McDonagh's The Guard one of the sharpest, most complex, and certainly funniest out of the crop of released over the last 12 months. Playing Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a rural Irish policeman, he plays a lecherous, drug using, amiably corrupt cop who somehow never once during the film's running time loses our sympathy or our attention. McDonagh places Sergeant Boyle and visiting FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) at the middle of a drug trafficking investigation, but that case--involving a trio of philosophical dealers--is really just an excuse to hang around with Boyle and find out how his mind works. In fact, Boyle's not really interested at all in the trafficking case until puts two dead bodies in his backyard.
The Guard isn't afraid to drift along on its own currents, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily aimless. We see Boyle's interaction with a variety of people and as a result we get to see different facets of the character along the way: he's a decent but foul-mouthed boy to his dying mother, a backwoods lout to his new officer, McBride (Rory Keenan), I imagine he's kind of an enigma to the drug traffickers who would rather bribe him or blackmail him because he's simply too much of a wild card. But the best part of the film is that all of these facets are honest and true to the character, and only enhance our understanding of Boyle. I love that he asks pointedly offensive, stupid, and Neanderthal questions of Agent Wendell because the latter has already sized him up as a backwoods cop and he's only too happy to oblige. I'm reminded a lot of his role as real-life crook Martin Cahill in 1998's The General--another instance where his character held multitudes of contradictions but were all still true.
It's almost a shame at the end when gunplay enters into it. Again, it's not dishonest to the character and I feel given the trajectory Boyle's life is on at that point in the story, he'd make the decisions he does, but at the same time the whole sequence feels lifted from another, broader action movie entirely.
By the way, I feel bad for neglecting the other two excellent performances, Cheadle as the uptight Wendell who brags that he's from a "privileged background" when pressed about having ever used crack or his knowledge of the projects and Mark Strong as a sort of henchman for the lead trafficker who was probably just one or two decisions away from doing something more interesting with his life, and is bored with the incompetence around him. In a better world, his character, Wendell, and Boyle would have shared more scenes together.
I say The Guard has one of my favorite roles of the year but I'm not certain it's one of my favorite movies. It's certainly one of the funniest and McDonagh's deftness with dialog is undeniable. I can't, however, say that I'm in love with the ending and the whole climax leading up to it, but given the excellence of the rest of the film, it'll have to do.
Audio, Video, and Special Features
It's a good-looking movie with a fairly crisp picture, but I think some viewers like myself may need the subitles to catch the dialog around the accents (yes, I also used subs for Attack the Block, what of it?). The disc is also pretty feature-rich including a short film written and directed by McDonagh called The Second Death which is mostly a mood piece but is also notable because three of its actors have major roles on HBO's Game of Thrones.