A couple of years ago a film was released to almost universal apathy, and cinema-going disinterest. This happened because it was by a largely unproven writer/director, starred Colin Farrell before we realised he was good, and had a truly awful trailer. That film was In Bruges, by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, and thanks to it being £3 on DVD in Fopp, the world now hopefully knows it’s one of the blackly funniest, brilliantly violent, endlessly quotable films of recent times. Well, Martin has a brother: John Michael McDonagh. And his directorial/writing debut feature The Guard turns out to be every bit as good.

Also starring Brendan Gleeson (must be a family friend, since he also appeared in Martin’s Six Shooter short) The Guard centres around a sweary, objectionable, lackadaisical police sergeant, in sleepy Connemara, whose path crosses with the FBI, who are tracking a drug smuggling boat along the coast. That’s your plot. That’s really it.

What follows, and we’re talking from the very first seconds of screen time is the coolest, funniest film of the year. Gleeson has never been better, playing Sergeant Gerry Boyle like a man who couldn’t give a fuck about ANYTHING, all to the incredulous disgust of Don Cheadle, as the FBI’s straight-up Wendell Everett. And, to borrow a quote about another film, McDonagh wrote the shit out of this script. And so the rest of this review will just be a selection of our favourite quotes from what is, without a doubt, our favourite film of the year.

“There were gays in the IRA?”
“One or two. It was the only way we could successfully infiltrate MI5”.

“Like a donkey fucking a hippopotamus, it’s party time”.

“The only time a baby doesn’t look like every other baby is when it’s a really fucking ugly baby. So unless you’re about to show me a picture of a really fucking ugly baby, I don’t want to see it”.

The Guard is released on August 19. Don’t wait for it to come out DVD this time.

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