94% The Guard

All Critics (101) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (95) | Rotten (6)

Although The Guard is primarily a language romp, it's also a terrific showcase for veteran pug-faced character actor Brendan Gleeson.

Brendan Gleeson is a blooming marvel.

A laugh-out-loud comedy as hard as "The French Connection," a modern spaghetti Western on the windswept wastes of Ireland.

Crisp, acid-tongued and sharply acted, it's the sort of exercise in tangy Celtic cynicism that's become one of the Emerald Isle's most reliable imports.

There are few things finer in cinema than Brendan Gleeson's fat, happy face.

McDonagh's script is agile, darting between the ridiculous, the sage and the surprisingly sentimental. His love of language and the absurd has hints of the wisecracking Quentin Tarantino. But the story is decidedly more rooted in Ireland's loamy turf.

The ambiguous ending raises a smile rather than a frown, and leaves one hoping that the McDonagh brothers will continue to find charismatic and interesting roles for Brendan Gleeson in films to come.

It takes a special skill to make this sort of complex schematic coherent, and, the attractive performances aside, it doesn't always work here.

The Guard is the sort of movie that makes you smile and squirm, often within the confines of the same scene. It's certainly engaging, though many times I felt the film's stylistic choices overwhelmed its sense of itself.

Brendan Gleeson's performance in The Guard will be remembered as one of the best of 2011.

If you like your cops and robbers stories laced with Irish humour, you'll want to see The Guard, a film that blends crime and blarney in equal measure.

The film is foul-mouthed and not without its flourishes of violence but it's irresistibly likeable (and unpredictable).

Boyle is probably the first screen hero in a long time whose heroism comes out of boredom and ennui. He gives nihilism a good name.

Augmenting a smart, witty screenplay is magnificent Scope camerawork by Larry Smith, using beautiful locations around the west coast of Ireland.

A shifty, cunning and gloriously off-kilter affair.

It's a good thing the two main characters are played by actors who can make these shifts in tone work otherwise this could have been one big mess

Driven by pitch-perfect performances and a darkly humoured script, this ends up an hysterically funny and immensely enjoyable romp.

Delightfully dark, The Guard is the latest buddy comedy classic, and a must-see for fans of Hot Fuzz and In Bruges.

The film falters when it gets into the somber philosophising that was done so much better in [Martin McDonough's] In Bruges. Still, that movie was primarily a drama, and this one is absolutely a comedy. One of the funniest of the year, no question.

Gleeson is perhaps the only true reason to sit through The Guard, a satisfactory yet oddly monotonous police adventure in dire need of the actor's perfectly timed delivery.

The Guard is certainly good for a laugh or two, but those that are claiming it to be funnier than In Bruges are claiming things that aren't true.

Gleeson's Boyle constantly wrong-foots those around him. He has no time for political correctness, yet it's his mealy-mouthed PC-Plod colleagues who are the real racists ... McDonagh's film shares his jaunty irreverance.

Great fun when taken in the right spirit, which would be Old Paddy with a Guinness chaser.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_guard_2011/

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