Michael McDonagh's "The Guard'

Michael McDonagh's black comedy The Guard opens with a scene that's all too familiar to denizens of police movies: A carload of teenagers speeds through the rolling hills of western Ireland on a narrow, winding road, changing lanes wildly, swigging whisky and blaring awful music. They blast right past Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a shambling bear of an Irish policeman (Brendan Gleeeson) who is lackadaisically manning a speed trap.

But Boyle is no conventional cop, and The Guard is no conventional police film. When the teens' joyride ends abruptly in a bloody crash, Boyle barely glances up from his newspaper. When he finally shuffles through the wreckage and brutalized bodies, he bends down and checks the pockets of one of the corpses and finds a baggie of narcotics. Tsk-ing the dead teen, he pops a tab into his mouth and pockets the rest. All in a day's work.

This introduction grounds The Guard in the craggy emptiness of Galway and establishes Boyle's credentials as a bad cop. But he's never portrayed as evil (as in, say, Antoine Fuqua's Training Day of 2001) or violently righteous (pick any of the Lethal Weapon films).

Small-scale corruption

Films about rogue cops usually invite us to sympathize with the cynical protagonist because he works in a venal system, or he must cope with incorrigibly evil enemies, or both. But The Guard simply presents us with a man who likes to keep his corruption on a small scale, in contrast to his totally corrupted superiors.

That opening crash triggers a plot that requires Boyle to work with a straight-arrow FBI agent (Don Cheadle) to pursue a gaggle of international drug smugglers. Their relationship is complicated by Boyle's seemingly bemused racist comments to his black partner.

Cheadle's character, grossly out of his depth amid western Ireland's Gaelic-speaking population and thoroughly corrupt constabulary, mostly looks on in awestruck horror as Boyle proceeds to solve the case between drinks and visits to his ailing mum. (At one point, Boyle excuses himself from the investigation, explaining to his FBI partner that he has a "personal day" planned— specifically, gallivanting around his bedroom with a pair of high-end prostitutes.)

Loose cannons

Big-budget police films usually fall back on a predictable dramatic gimmick: pairing the straitlaced cop (always male) with a maverick. Just as predictably, such films usually trot out some deep-seated personal trauma that explains the loose cannon's often-violent behavior. Not so Boyle. For one thing, he seems to have little taste for violence. He just likes sex, drugs and drink. And The Guard spares us the heavy-handed Freudian explanations.

In this role, Gleeson captures Boyle in all his shabby glory (unlike Cheadle, who comes across as an actor playing a part well).

The film's villains are middle-aged gangsters growing tired of their criminal life and given to quoting Nietzsche. Their leader, the all-purpose heavy Mark Strong (he was the villain in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes), imbues his character with the appropriate amount of exasperated boredom. At one point the trio meets in an aquarium, where Strong bemoans the quality of people he has to interact with in the drug trade. He then turns to the camera and deadpans: "I like sharks. I find them soothing."

Brother act

The Guard is the debut effort of writer-director John Michael McDonagh, the older brother of playwright and director Martin McDonagh, whose film In Bruges also starred Gleeson. Both The Guard and In Bruges are darkly comic movies, studded with violence, morally dilapidated characters and a weird, politically incorrect humor that some moviegoers may find off-putting.

On the other hand, In Bruges could be grimly brutal and even, at times, morally serious. The Guard is neither. Its violence is rarely chilling, nor is it particularly gory. McDonagh touches on a number of themes any one of which, in another light (say, The Red Riding Trilogy) could be deadly serious: police corruption, cold-blooded murder, racism, mutilated corpses, substance abuse and violence against sex workers, to name a few. But The Guard doesn't reflect upon these issues. It's just out for a little good fun. This is summer, after all.