The Guard

JOHN MICHAEL McDonagh? Now, that name sounds familiar. You’re thinking along the right lines.

This entertaining Irish thriller is cut to the same ragged beats and seasoned with the same class of profane language as the plays and films of Martin McDonagh. That writer's older brother has – as Martin did for In Bruges– also managed to drag out another flawlessly earthy performance from the unstoppable Brendan Gleeson. Sure, The Guardfeels a little familiar (doubly so, if you note McDonagh Jr's apparent debts to Tarantino), but, as exercises in Hibernosploitation go, it's not half bad.

Whether intentionally or not, The Guardplays like an absurdist take on In the Heat of the Night. Gleeson stars as Gerry Boyle, a Galwegian cop with a taste for pints, hookers and casual racism. The picture begins with him discovering a corpse that appears to have some connection to a massive importation of drugs. His easy life is disrupted when FBI agent Wendell Everett (a droll Don Cheadle) turns up to assist with the case's international dimensions.

Here we have a classic mismatched buddy partnership. Gerry is loud-mouthed, boozy, rough and undiplomatic. Wendell is cultured, disciplined, controlled and dedicated. As with In the Heat of the Night, however, both men are, in their own very different ways, committed to getting at the truth. Inevitably, a spiky friendship develops.

The hero’s mildly racist outbursts – he assumes (or pretends to assume) that Wendell must be from “the projects” – occasionally nudge us into that difficult territory where we laugh with rather than at the low-level boor. But the sentences are so propulsive that it quickly proves hard to care.

A larger problem stems from the need to constantly insert showy linguistic nonsequiturs into the dialogue: the references to distinguished philosophers, for instance, get ever more tiresome with each repetition.

The Guardremains, however, a very diverting exercise in applied filth and creative absurdity. It's nice to know that, if one McDonagh goes missing, we have a spare in reserve.