The Guard (Ireland, 2011)
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Starring Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong

Film reviewers like me frequently get accused of being unable to appreciate films designed purely to entertain. But while we may spend a lot of our time directing people towards films in which entertainment may not be top priority, we are as capable as the next punter of having a good time. The Guard is the latest film to prove this, being the most purely entertaining film since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.From a cineaste's point of view, The Guard contains a great number of familiar genre elements. It has described as a cross between Lethal Weapon and Father Ted, and there are strong hints of both throughout. The pairing of Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle is in the buddy cop style, with one being by-the-book to the point of being inept, and the other being a loose cannon who is unprofessional but gets the job done. The shots of the landscape in and around Connemara resemble the opening credits of Father Ted, and there are occasions when Gleeson's facial expressions copy those of Father Dougal.The film is also deeply rooted in the conventions of westerns. Gleeson's performance has been specifically compared to Gary Cooper's in High Noon (high praise indeed), but more generally the film corresponds to the stock western plot of the irascible, antiheroic sheriff defending his town from simple-minded crooks. From a more European perspective, one could compare The Guard to the 1930s comedies of Will Hay: there are hints of Ask a Policeman in the role of smugglers, and Oh Mr. Porter! in the Connemara settling and the seeming simple-mindedness of the characters.The Guard is the debut film from writer-director John Michael McDonagh, whose brother Martin McDonagh previously worked with Gleeson on In Bruges. As with his brother's debut, the stock plots and familiar conventions of The Guard are a springboard to create interesting characters and carve out a distinctive niche through strong language and violence. But The Guard emerges as the superior film, for two clear reasons.Firstly, the film benefits from a low-budget aesthetic. Because In Bruges looked relatively glossy and was flashily directed, it led you to expect something very polished and balanced, so that whenever the more constrictive elements of the plot encroached, you felt somewhat underwhelmed. The Guard doesn't have the luxury of looking like an expensive film, with understated camerawork and a more washed-out colour palette. But this has the side effect of allowing the script to breathe, so that we are less conscious of the clichés when they do come to the surface.Secondly, The Guard benefits from a relative lack of archness in its characters. Both filming are incredibly knowing in their construction of dialogue, from the police officers discussing Fellini's 8 1/2 to the lad with the camera commenting that the events that transpired would make a really great book one day. But where In Bruges occasionally felt like it was showing off, being arch for its own sake, The Guard puts the brakes on all that very quickly. The characters feel more genuine and more immediately likeable, even in their most questionable or archetypal moments.One of the best examples of this latter trend comes in the performance of Mark Strong. He plays a British gangster hired by the Irish mob to oversee the cocaine smuggling operation, and is as much a fish out of water as Don Cheadle's character. In one of the best scenes in the film, he delivers a bribe to two corrupt police officers, who offer up clichéd lines like "It's all there?". Strong's response is sarcastic but smart, pointing out not only the inherent stupidity of their question within the confines of the film, but also the silliness of a particular generic convention. His character embodies the part of our brain that says "well that wouldn't happen", and seeing that urge physicalized is a real delight.There is a similar intelligence with regard to the distinctly un-PC humour of Sergeant Gerry Boyle. The script for The Guard is fantastically bad taste and walks the tightrope between laughter and pain with perfect balance. You'll quickly lose count of the number of times you'll laugh yourself stupid, squirm in your seat, or do both at once whenever Boyle opens his mouth. One particularly funny faux pas occurs when Boyle and Everett are having breakfast, and the conversation moves on to skiing. Boyle remarks: "I thought black guys couldn't ski?". Awkward pause. "Or is that swimming?".Such scenes recall the Father Ted episode 'Are You Right There, Father Ted?', in which Ted is accused of being a racist and attempts unsuccessfully to put things right. Both are attacking racists and racism by showing how utterly absurd and pitiful such statements or attitudes are. Boyle has the same misplaced innocence as Father Dougal and does not understand that what he is saying is wrong or insensitive: when berated for his remarks at the FBI briefing, he remarks that racism is part of his culture. We may find Boyle likeable as a character, but the film doesn't use ignorance as an excuse to condone any of his vices, whether racism, drinking, or using two hookers on his day off. We laugh at the statements and the characters, rather than with them.But in the midst of this knowing use of racial epithets and black humour, there is a more melancholy side to the film. Boyle may be unconventional, but he is not entirely a happy-go-lucky buffoon who has everything he needs and couldn't care less. There are several scenes where he visits his dying mother, scenes which make us laugh by showing where he got his spirit from. But these moments, and those featuring the young children, are reminiscent of Being There, contrasting the well-meaning, almost clownish central character with the dark world around him.In Being There, the gag was that whenever Chance spoke his mind, people read into his words and behaviour as if he were a guru, rather than just the sheltered child whose only life experience was in tending gardens. Boyle may not be sheltered, but there is a through-line in the characters' growing acceptance of his value as a member of the force and an ultimately upstanding human being. As Everett remarks early on, "I can't tell if you're really motherfucking dumb, or really motherfucking smart", though by the end he has clearly made up his mind.The Guard hangs on the brilliant central performance of Brendan Gleeson. He is clearly enjoying himself, taking McDonagh's script and breathing life into the character though naturalistic mannerisms and great comic timing. He improves on his performance in In Bruges and is as commanding a screen presence as he has ever been. Don Cheadle compliments him perfectly, proving his comedic worth by playing everything poker straight. The montage of him attempting to interview the locals, including a horse, is a particular highlight.Taken as a piece of pure, undiluted entertainment, The Guard is one of the best films of the year. It is deeply generic and occasionally its low-budget aesthetic works against it, with the sound design rendering some of the thicker accents inaudible. But those are little niggles which fail to tarnish a hilarious and beautifully constructed black comedy. Brendan Gleeson has given interviews suggesting that the McDonagh brothers have a friendly rivalry. On the basis of this, it's one-nil to John.

Rating:
Verdict: This year's Scott Pilgrim

In Bruges (UK, 2008)
Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clemence Poesy

There have been a number of British gangster films in the last ten years which have re-approached well-worn crime thriller stories through distinctive dialogue, full-on violence and black humour. At its height this wave produced Gangster No. 1 and Sexy Beast, featuring barnstorming central performances by Malcolm McDowell and Ben Kingsley as near-mythical incarnations of evil. And while In Bruges never quite matches up to either of these, there is plenty in the way of humour and invention to render it thoroughly enjoyable.In Bruges is the debut film of playwright Martin McDonagh, most famous for his Leenane trilogy of plays - The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. All three plays revolve around brutal acts of murder in which the death in question has left deep emotional scars on the perpetrators: in the case of The Lonesome West, it has caused the two brothers to divide the house precisely in two, with each brother owning what is on one side of a line.What connects all McDonagh's work is a rich streak of black, absurdist humour, which walks the same tightrope as Samuel Beckett or in some cases Spike Milligan between the utterly ridiculous and the drolly melancholic. The extremities of the characters in In Bruges are not simply a ploy on McDonagh's part to make a stock plot seem distinctive. They are there to deepen the archetypes and bring out more deeper, existential elements in the story and the characters, using banality to introduce depth.In Bruges begins with the same old story of a hitman (or hitmen in this case) hiding out in a foreign town after completing a job. Both men are faced with the prospect of being there for an undetermined amount of time, with nothing to do except spend their money and wait for instructions. Ken (Brendan Gleeson), the elder of the two, wants to take in the sights and wait patiently to move on, while Ray (an on-form Colin Farrell) is content to confine his sight-seeing to the bottoms of beer glasses.As with The American, Anton Corbijn's recent genre exercise, the characters in In Bruges carry guilt from a past mistake - in this case the death of a child during the assassination of a Catholic priest. Whole sections of the film tip their hat knowingly to Don't Look Now - so knowingly that Clemence Poesy feels the need to mention it on the set of the film-within-a-film. Just as Donald Sutherland keeps seeing images of a girl in red around Venice, and becomes convinced that he is seeing his daughter, so Ray's encounters with the dwarf actor are made all the more awkward by his memories of what went wrong.There are also strong connections with Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's striking depiction of Catholic guilt and redemption. Like Harvey Keitel's character, Ken and Ray are struggling with the ins and outs of judgement and redemption, struggling to come to terms with their purpose and meaning as they stare increasingly into the abyss. There are conversations about purgatory, and the film-within-a-film refers to Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th-century painter famous for his depictions of hell.Within this context, Bruges becomes the purgatory into which our characters have landed and whose attitude reflects their ultimate ability or willingness to escape. Ray feels immense guilt for what happened to the child, but this guilt is matched by a desire to atone and escape. His final words, as he is loaded into the ambulance and passes out, see him leaving purgatory, content with death over remaining there even if death leads to damnation. Ken, on the other hand, is more resigned to his fate and is less willing to put up a fight when Harry's angel of death arrives. Having killed many more men than Ray, he knows that he will never see heaven. Although he attempts to help Ray both in life and death, he ultimately allows death to find him and puts up very little resistance.

But by far and away, the biggest debt of In Bruges is to Harold Pinter, specifically The Dumb Waiter from which most of the premise is taken. It shares the central idea of two hitmen who spend most of their time talking and arguing about things which seem utterly irrelevant but are in fact nothing of the sort. And the final twist is the same, although this is revealed a lot earlier than in Pinter's script. The only massive departure, in terms of character at least, comes in the role of Harry, played with typical venom by Ralph Fiennes. Dumb is the last word you would use to describe his character, whose every word feels like an acidic curse even when he isn't swearing his mouth off.Because the genre ingredients are so familiar and knowingly played, there are two traps into which In Bruges could easily fall. The first is descending into total caricature, along the lines of Guy Ritchie's early efforts: the language and gestures become so ridiculous that all sense of believability is lost. Although Harry is particularly outrageous in his behaviour, the film stays just the right side of caricature, playing up the absurd elements while using the language and violence to keep us feeling threatened even as we laugh ourselves silly. A typical example of this would be Fiennes' first appearance, when he smashes his office phone to pieces in frustration. It's very funny to see a grown man concentrate his rage on something so small so repeatedly, but even as we laugh we realise that he is capable of doing the same thing to something more fleshy, with horrible consequences.The second, more common trap is that the ordinary nature of the story acts as a lead weight on the character development: in other words, the story is too thin or straightforward either to allow extended character development, or to give any reason for such a thing to occur. While In Bruges doesn't completely fall into this trap, its story is disappointingly simple once all the language, violence and pondering has been stripped away.

Because of its clear resemblance to Pinter's work, one could argue that this criticism should not be levelled against McDonagh but Pinter himself. Pinter was part of a theatrical tradition started by Beckett in which characters existed and acted regardless of or in absence of any story - Beckett's later plays often occur well after the action has taken place, and said action is only referred to in passing. But this paucity of actual plot has not prevented some of Pinter's other works from translating successfully to the screen, most notably The Birthday Party and Betrayal.In Bruges is caught between a rock and a hard place in its relationship to genre. On the one hand, the touchstones to previous crime thrillers are so clear that it struggles to escape from convention when it really needs to: we know more or less where it is going even before Harry arrives, and so its scope for exploring things on a profoundly existential level is limited. On the other hand, when it does manage to elevate itself above convention, there is not enough narrative drive in the characters to prevent their conversations from going around in circles. As The Bed-Sitting Room proved, it is difficult to put work in Beckett's vein on screen without it feeling lacking in narrative, something which is perhaps less of a problem on stage.While this aspect of In Bruges remains frustrating, the film is still thoroughly entertaining thanks to the quality of its cast. Fiennes is the highlight, with Harry being clearly modelled on the work of Louis Mellis and David Scinto: in his relentlessness and constant anger, he could pass for a cousin of Don Logan. That said, his performance wouldn't work without someone more understated to counterpoint him, and Farrell achieves that masterfully. Having drifted in his career between total fluff (Alexander) and pretentious waffle (The New World), he gets the balance spot on to deliver a performance of vulnerability and sympathy. Gleeson anchors things in another fine performance, and Clemence Poesy is every bit as sweet and charming here as she was in Philip Ridley's Heartless.In Bruges is an interesting, entertaining and often hilarious take on a well-worn story and subject area. It is ultimately a little too generic for its own good, with McDonagh wrestling with the self-imposed confinements of genre in an effort to combine existentialism and narrative. The result is a partial success which makes for great late-night viewing, and while not up there with Gangster No. 1 or Sexy Beast, it comes through with most of the goods and hints at better things to come for its director.

Rating:
Verdict: Overly generic but highly entertaining