Review of The Guard (2011) by Sarfaraz A — 07 Aug 2012

[i]Law & Order: Gaeltacht[/i]?

Arguably, it is more important for an FBI agent who is visiting Ireland to know about the [i]Gaeltacht[/i] than for a Garda in Connemara to know that the FBI is based out of Quantico, not Langley. However, it's more unusual for someone to know about the [i]Gaeltacht[/i] than Quantico. After all, a substantial percentage of American popular culture references it. We are expected to believe that this man has never even seen [i]Silence of the Lambs[/i]? Still, this is a character who doesn't seem interested in anything much, and characters in fiction are often curiously divorced from all their world's pop culture, or else they are so immersed in it that it's a continual elbow in the collective ribs of the audience to remind us that the characters are people Just Like Us. As if anyone anywhere is just like the characters in this sort of movie.

Specifically, the characters are Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) and FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle). Gerry is disreputable at best, the sort of fellow who looks like he's half-drunk even when he's sober as a judge. He's the sort of policeman who throws away the drugs found on someone who's died in a crash so that their mother doesn't have to know about it, despite the fact that she'll probably find out from the autopsy report. One day, he is called in to deal with a murder. Shortly thereafter, all the local Gardai are summoned to a meeting wherein an FBI agent tells them about a group of drug smugglers working in the area. Gerry recognizes one of them, because he's seen the body. He sort-of partners with Agent Everett, who doesn't much like him and doesn't much have reason to. He doesn't much like Agent Everett, though, come to that; Agent Everett is also probably the first American and the first black from any country that Gerry has ever met.

We're supposed to get a lot more humour from that than I do. Gerry is often funny, but I got a little tired of things like his assuming that all drug dealers are either black or Hispanic and that Agent Everett must have grown up in the projects. It rather gives the lie to his supposed total ignorance of popular culture; clearly, he's seen a lot of [i]Miami Vice[/i] if nothing else. There's a scene where Gerry sleeps with a couple of prostitutes, and it largely seems there to set up a series of later jokes about his having caught something from them. I suppose it also shows us how degenerate he is, but I think we'd just about worked that one out on our own. Having him almost but not quite hit on the widow (Katarina Cas) of his murdered partner (Rory Keenan) handles that one for us without the added scenes of Brendan Gleeson cavorting with two girls in "sexy cop" outfits.

I can't help wondering if it's a problem for the police in various parts of the world with relatively low crime rates that, when they do encounter a major crime, the police are all influenced by what they've seen on TV. Yes, all right, Gerry is probably a bad cop regardless. Certainly his determination to avenge Aidan McBride doesn't have much to do with his fondness for the man, who was new to the force when he was killed. However, he seems to think that he has certain permissions in how to behave because he's working with an honest-to-Gods American law enforcement officer. FBI, CIA--heck, he'd probably act the same way if he were working with a county sheriff. There's just something about how American cops are portrayed in the media that seems to lead Gerry to assume that the way they're going to proceed is with guns a-blazing. Even though it's probably not the smartest way of handling the situation.

Oh, this was amusing enough. Certainly it was more fun than what I'd intended to review today. ([i]No Tomorrow[/i], a grim examination of the death penalty that's a follow-up to [i]Aging Out[/i], a documentary about getting out of the foster care system whose subject was murdered. As you probably knew without being told, it's not in the system.) However, this is yet another example of getting a movie only to discover that the best moments are pretty much all in the trailer. There's a kid--alas, I'm not sure of his name--who provides a few more moments of entertaining, and Brendan Gleeson gets some lines which manage to be funny but not horribly racist. Don Cheadle spends most of the movie looking like he wants to hit him, which is fine, because I rather agree. And I will say, you know, it certainly isn't "laughing at" humour. We're supposed to be on Gerry's side. The problem is that, quite often, I can't be no matter what the filmmakers clearly wanted of me.