He’s good. He’s bad. He’s also kind of ugly. But Most of all, Brendan Gleeson is slyly brilliant in John Michael McDonagh’s feature film debut, The Guard. Something of a comedic contemporary Western, albeit taking place amid the dry stone walls of Connemara on the wesht coast of Ireland, Gleeson is Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Garda officer dealing with the looming threat of an international drugs cartel, a pencil-pushing FBI Agent (Don Cheadle) flown over to solve the case, and the crushing apathy of his own professional ennui.
Shrewdly perceptive of the criminal underbelly, cruelly dismissive of his fellow officers, Boyle concentrates his detective skills on finding money in murder victim’s wallets, ordering prostitutes from the big city, and deliberately undermining his superiors for his own amusement. Gleeson is dryly arresting and dominates every scene he’s in as Boyle, layering this country Garda with enough sharp intelligence and underhanded charm to win the audience over to a man who’s so comfortable in his public service job that he won’t consider cancelling his day off in the middle of a full-scale international investigation. His Boyle is enigmatic, annoyingly brilliant and with surprising integrity and balls in the big blast ending.
