Directed by John Michael McDonagh.
Starring Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, Rory Keenan and Mark Strong.
SYNOPSIS:
A small town Irish cop with a confrontational personality teams up with an FBI agent to investigate an international cocaine-smuggling ring.
The Guard is an small, off-beat film that works well as a comedy, but not so well in other departments. It plays like a cross between Bad Lieutenant and In Bruges, but set in small town Ireland, which gives the film its charm and originality, but it feels like one joke stretched over 90 minutes, and this is its downfall.
First and foremost, however, it is a comedy and because of this the film is largely a success. As the title character, Brendan Gleeson is superb in a role which was clearly written with him in mind; the character is vulgar, racist, drinks on the job, solicits with hookers, and generally doesn’t give a damn about this responsibilities as a policeman, yet Gleeson’s ability to make us actually like him is a testament to his talent as a actor. We can never be sure if he means the outrageous things he says, or if he is actually rather clever at working out a character through their responses. I think it is the latter because the script has a gloss of knowingness and awareness about it, which is also its undoing and something I shall comment on later.
If Brendan Gleeson covers the Bad Lieutenant side of the film (I use the connection very loosely of course), the Don Cheadle’s FBI man is the proverbial ‘fish out of water’ as we saw in In Bruges. A guy who doesn’t belong in the country, can’t communicate with the Gaelic community, and struggles at every turn. Sadly Cheadle’s role is underwritten, and I never felt a connection between the two leads but rather the focus always was on Gleeson. That’s fine because it is his character which is the most interesting and carries the film along, but the dichotomy of America meets Ireland and the massive differences between the two is never fully realised and I see this as a wasted opportunity to take a different approach on the buddy-cop theme. I know this isn’t supposed to be 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon, but having an actor like Cheadle involved could have lead to a lot more. In fact, take the American angle out of this film, and the film still works just as well. Gleeson could have been just as racist and obscene to another minority, and kept the same plot line.
For all the laughs that come from the ‘Irish charm’ of Gleeson, the film offers little else, and begins to lose its way once the effect of the constant obscenities wears off. Few things infuriate me more than when a script has it’s ‘tough-guy’ characters talking about philosophy and the arts and poetry in an attempt to break the mould of having them talk about their actual job. Post Pulp Fiction, it just strikes me a sloppy and not nearly as clever as the writer would have you think. The Guard falls in to this trap several times. Writer/Director John Michael McDonagh has created a very interesting central character, but I found the supporting roles to be lacking.
The film has been labeled as a western, but I think this is just a way of making it seem like something it isn’t; The Guard is not a modern western in the same way that, for example, James Mangold’s Copland was. Moreover, The Guard has its climatic shootout which is against the whole tone of the rest of the film. Westerns set their tone out from the very start and build up to the final showdown; The Guard appears to crowbar it in for no other reason than it wants a shootout.
The Guard is undeniably a good film, but nothing more than good. It is not this year’s In Bruges, it is not a modern western, and it is not as good as it thinks it is. Just because a film is British, doesn’t mean we can’t find its faults.
VERDICT: 6 OUT OF 10
Rohan Morbey - follow me on Twitter.
Movie Review Archive
Our episode begins with a couple of revelations. Well about two and a half if you really want to be technical. In stopping her new boy-toy, Eric, from introducing her past lover to the true death, she realizes that she still very much loves Bill. As if the rest of us didn’t already know that. Another revelation is that the Antonia half of Marnie/Antonia felt extremely guilty about the killing of many innocent people due to her attack. You can see the doubt as well as regret all over her face. The third is that although Eric now has all of his memories back, he actually stills love Sookie. My only question to this is, although it’s all sorts of sweet of disgustingly romantic, what the hell is going on? Did anyone ever see Eric, a Viking badass, falling in love with a fairy? I know I didn’t. Well I kind of did but was just hoping against hope that it didn’t. 
After a record-breaking opening last weekend, 
“I was doing some turning out in England the other day because I’m selling my apartment there,” recalls British film editor Anne V. Coates who made a surprising discovery. “I came across this letter which said, ‘Dear Mr. Spiegel, I don’t think I can cut 
As to how she got associated with 
The biggest challenge was the amount of footage. “We had 33 miles of film. That’s a lot of film to go through and make choices on in very little time,” reveals the native of Reigate, England. “The difficulty was working out what you were going to leave out. David said that once. What makes a really good editor is what they leave out of a film.” A much celebrated transition is the one of a lighted match to a sunrise. “It was in the script as a dissolve, but we saw it cut together before we had the optical delivered. We looked at the job and said, ‘My, God it worked fantastic!’ We tried taking a frame off here and there. David said to me in the end, ‘That’s nearly perfect. Take it away and make it perfect.’ I literally took two frames off of the outgoing scene and that’s the way it is today. It wasn’t a momentous thing to us. It was only when somebody rang me at three o’clock in the morning from Australia to ask me what I was thinking about when I did that cut; I said, ‘I didn’t have any idea.’ Several direct cuts like that were originally my idea because David hadn’t seen the La Nouvelle Vague French direct cutting. I got him to see a couple of films. He loved it and did it even better. We didn’t over do it. We had so much footage I could have cut another whole film of 
Anne Hathaway’s performance in 
Sturgess came to prominence in 
What now for Sturgess, after the game changer that is 
I know, I know. There is no alternative to Anne Hathaway, I hear you cry, members of the “I need Anne Hathaway like oxygen” club. She is undoubtedly a very pretty lady. I certainly did not object when she took her clothes off in Love and Other Drugs and she’ll no doubt look superb in leather in The Dark Knight Rises. She is also talented. She’s won deserved critical acclaim for her performances in Rachel Getting Married and The Devil Wears Prada etc, etc. Whatever her limitations in the accent department, Anne is what you’d call a hot Hollywood property, if you were the type to say such things. 
1. Carey Mulligan worked with One Day’s director Lone Scherfig on her breakthrough picture, An Education. In my opinion she was perhaps the best Emma on offer. She is usually seen as more middle class characters with prim English voices but she would have nailed the studious, quietly creative and brilliant nature of Emma. You can imagine her hunched over a typewriter or book, looking shy, cute and inexplicably alluring. Basically she could play a convincing bookworm with strong principles. She also has the acting chops to deal with Emma’s heartache and traumas later in life. And when she whips off the glasses and comes out of her shell towards the end, when things start going right, audiences would be plausibly wowed at the blossoming beauty. Hathaway looked like a movie star dressing up as geeky and common.
2. Rebecca Hall starred alongside James McAvoy in Starter for Ten, another David Nicholls book he adapted himself into a movie, with considerably more success. Starter for Ten works well as a whole. It’s predictable but extremely enjoyable stuff. Hall’s character is a constant figure in the background, a determined student activist, who McAvoy’s University Challenge contestant eventually realises he’s meant to be with. She’s adept at being a student and shows an Emma Morley-esque kind nature throughout but the two characters are oceans apart. Could Hall do shy Emma? Her flourishing acting career shows her diversity. My bet is she’d have been as good as Hathaway at least.
3. Gemma Arterton has been a Bond girl, as well as mastering the regional dialect of the West Country to play frank seductress Tamara Drewe. She’s got double the amount of ticks in the accent column thanks to her role as another Dorset heroine; Tess in the BBC’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles. After Tess, Arterton will be no stranger to epic romance but like Hathaway she might be too conventionally pretty to pull off library lover Emma, who got a first in English and History from Edinburgh.
Novels can be described as “cinematic” for different reasons. The prose might have a lush, vivid attention to detail that would translate into award winning visuals on screen. There might be a twisty, zippy, unpredictable plot on the page probably perfect for a gripping thriller. The author may have managed to conjure a succession of particularly fresh and engrossing action scenes or mastered the art of quick witted dialogue. Just because a book is successful and it earns the description “cinematic” however, does not necessarily mean it will work well as a film. 
For the few of you that haven’t somehow heard about the book’s premise, One Day follows students Emma and Dexter, or Em and Dex, as they graduate from Edinburgh University in 1988, right up until the late noughties. But the unique selling point is that we only drop in on their lives, together and apart, on the same day each year; July the 15th, St Swithin’s Day. It’s on this day that Emma and Dexter almost “do the deed” after graduation and the date continues to have significance throughout their lives and the friendship that follows.
Back to that word “cinematic” then. It was the fresh idea of parachuting into the story via the same date annually which many book reviewers had labelled “cinematic”. On the page it did feel filmic, partly due to the pace but mainly because of the added intensity. Emotional punches usually came from nowhere because we’d skipped twelve months of Emma or Dexter’s lives. With the written word we also steadily accumulated information, so that we literally got to know them. But the first few years flash by at the cinema and we don’t care at all.
Thankfully for the film it ends strongly. There are enjoyable performances from both Rafe Spall and Romola Garai, as Em and Dex finally grow up too late. The years gradually tick over and we do get to know the characters that seemed alive almost instantly in the book. The dialogue gets less expositional because the background has been established with the disappointing opening. For me the turning point was a moment when Dexter, superbly played by Jim Sturgess, lifts his mother, who is suffering from cancer, up the stairs to bed. It’s the first time in the film that heartstrings are properly pulled and the first convincing scene of character development.
Historical martial arts epic 
