The Guard (2011)

Comedy, Crime, Thriller

Director: John Michael McDonagh
Writer: John Michael McDonagh
Starring: Ronan Collins, Paraic Nialand, John Patrick Beirne, Liam O'Conghaile

"The FBI are about to discover that things work a little different around here."

The Guard is an Irish comedy, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, the brother of In Bruges' director Martin McDonagh.

The movie, as stated by the director himself, is a Western set in today's West Ireland, a borderland inhabited by bandits, traffickers, murderers, a land where morality is something for which people fight and die every day.

Brendan Gleeson plays a member of the Garda (Irish police), fond of unconventional methods, forced to work alongside an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) investigating a large shipment of cocaine expected to be smuggled in the country through a provincial port.

These are the premises for a film that looks like a comic thriller, but soon moves toward more dark and dramatic situations.

Plot summary from IMDb: Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town Irish cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humor, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought straight-laced FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door.

Awards: Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 14 wins & 25 nominations.
Runtime: 96 min
R