Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Guard

The Guard (15A)
Brendan Gleeson stars as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Connemara-based Garda whose feckless existence is compromised when FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) appears in Galway on the hunt for a gang of international drug smugglers. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother of the award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh, The Guard employs the narrative structure of a conventional police procedural to unleash a wickedly black comedy of manners. The culture-clash between the focused and driven Everett and the irreverent and occasionally criminal Boyle is sharply observed, with Cheadle (who co-produces) content to play the straight man to Gleeson’s foul-mouthed stream of non sequiturs. Both actors are in fine fettle, and the rest of the cast - including Liam Cunningham, Larry Wilmot and Fionnula Flanagan - are happy to cruise along in their slipstream and heighten the surreal sense of humour, which is rooted in a very Irish resentment of authority in any form. The latter stages flatten the characterisations as McDonagh sets in train a manic finale, which is a little too derivative of the comedy-crime caper staples to be truly satisfying, but for the most part The Guard is one of the funniest comedies of the year to date. **** - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner

Wicka Wicka Wild West

I’ve no idea what it is they’re putting in the water over there these days, but the west coast of Ireland, if what we’re seeing on screen is to be believed, is going to hell in a hand-basket. RTE’s acclaimed TV series about a lone rural cop, ‘Single-Handed’, recently had its fourth run; Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS was adapted as ‘Jack Taylor’, starring Iain Glen; now comes ‘The Guard’, which this week opened the Sundance Festival World Dramatic Competition. To wit:

‘The Guard’ is a thriller-comedy set on the west coast of Ireland where Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to his door.

The film is written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother to playwright and film director Martin McDonagh (‘The Lonesome West’ et al, ‘In Bruges’), who doubles up here, along with Don Cheadle, as executive producer. The big attraction for me here is Brendan Gleeson, though, an immensely likeable and always watchable actor, and by all accounts a thoroughly nice bloke to boot. Variety likes him too, with the gist of its Sundance review running thusly:

“… it’s Gleeson who rightly owns the screen as a beer-swilling, crotch-grabbing, Derringer-firing crusader with one hell of a filthy mouth to go along with his heart of gold,” while the director John Michael McDonagh’s “filmmaking crackles with energy.”

According to Element Pictures, the movie will be getting a summer release here in Ireland. Should be a cracker.

Irish Crime Cinema: Now In Gigglevision

Perrier’s Bounty, a thriller starring Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson, opened in Ireland on Friday. I need hardly add that it’s a comedy crime caper; the humour is black, and the gangland Dublin setting suitably grim, but there’s no mistaking it for a serious crime flick.
 In fact, Ireland doesn’t really do serious crime flicks these days. The notable exception is the biopic Veronica Guerin, but even the two movies based on Martin ‘The General’ Cahill were played in large part for chuckles. I Went Down is a terrific film, but the criminals are for the most part figures of fun. In certain circumstances, such as Divorcing Jack, the comedy is the whole point, because Colin Bateman’s novel was written during a particularly dark period of the Troubles, when being able to laugh, and to do so by poking fun at paramilitaries of all stripes, was no mean feat in itself. But why hasn’t Irish cinema responded to the last decade or so in the way crime fiction has? Not all Irish crime fiction is a considered response to how we live now, but a good (the best) chunk of it is, and there’s no parallel development in Irish film. It can’t be a result of snobbery, because the genre / literary divide doesn’t seem to exist in cinema – The Departed and No Country For Old Men, to give two recent examples, won Best Picture Oscars and did serious box office in the process. So why, when faced with the issue of crime, does Irish cinema dissolve in a fit of giggles?
  Anyway, my review of Perrier’s Bounty runneth thusly:

Perrier’s Bounty (16s)
Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) is a man with problems. With only a few hours in which to find the money he owes to Dublin gangster Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson), Michael finds his woes multiplied when his next-door neighbour Brenda (Jodie Whittaker) shoots dead one of the thugs sent to put him under pressure. All of which is bad enough, but Mutt the loan shark (Liam Cunningham), who might be able to ease Michael’s financial burden, is a double-crossing rat. Oh, and Michael’s father (Jim Broadbent) shows up to tell Michael he’s dying. Given its gangland milieu, the archly comic tone and a script dense with incident and interwoven plot-strands, it’s almost inevitable that Perrier’s Bounty will be compared with Guy Ritchie’s comedy crime capers. The Dublin gangsters speak in a quasi-philosophical way about the business of criminality, much in the same way as the East End crooks do in Ritchie’s movies, and the writer, Mark O’Rowe, never misses an opportunity to insert a joke or gag, even when the story is crying out for a little gravitas give the characters some emotional ballast. Brenda, for example, never seems at all dismayed by the fact that she’s murdered someone, while Michael’s grim determination to pay back Perrier excludes any possibility of his taking time out to commiserate with his dying father. Modelled, in terms of Irish film, on Intermission and (the superior) I Went Down, the movie hits the ground with the cinematic equivalent of a screech of smoking tires, and goes from nought to sixty in seconds flat. For the first half-hour that’s all hugely entertaining, as the characters bounce off one another in an anarchic game of gangland pinball. Murphy is enjoyable as a cynical bottom-feeder with no illusions about life, while Gleeson is in scenery-chewing form as Perrier, a man with a grandiose perception of who he is and a loquacity to match. The director, Ian Fitzgibbon, showcases a deft hand at sustaining momentum, and it’s all shot with panache by cinematographer Seamus Deasy, who finds intriguingly murky corners of Dublin city to poke his camera into. That said, the fact that the pace never flags grows tiresome after a while, as the story turns into a relentless series of incidents that fails to give the audience the kind of emotional involvement that might allow them to care whether Michael survives through the night. ***

Sweet Little ’16

Not too long to go now to the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, in which a tiny army of Irish rebels led by Padraig Pearse and James Connolly rose up against the might of the British Empire in a bid to slough off the shackles of oppression that had lasted 800 years. It helped, of course, that the mighty British Empire was otherwise engaged at the time, and looking the other way, bogged down as it was in the trenches of France.
  Nonetheless, the Rising failed miserably, unless the objective was to see Dublin’s city centre levelled, and only belatedly became a success after the perfidious Brits, instead of recognising the courage-bordering-on-insanity of the men who took on the British war machine, had most of their leaders executed for treason and then incarcerated the rest in what would become a University of Insurrection at Frongoch in Wales.
  History being, in large part, the science of revisionism, the lead-up to the centenary celebrations of Easter 1916 will be a feast for Irish fans of propaganda. The battle for possession of the Rising will be fought on a number of fronts, most pertinently the silver screen, and it appears that the opening salvo will be sounded by LA-based Marathon Pictures. To wit:

Nicola Charles of LA-based Marathon Pictures has confirmed that principal photography is set in Ireland for the end of April 2010 on Jason Barry’s debut feature ‘Easter Sixteen’. It stars Gary Oldman as James Connolly (The Dark Knight, Leon), Guy Pearce (LA Confidential, Memento) as Patrick Pearse and Ian Hart (Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy) as Thomas Clarke, Chris O’Donnell (Kinsey, Scent of a Woman) as Ross, Elaine Cassidy (Felicia’s Journey, The Others) as Nora, and Anthony La Paglia (The Salton Sea, Sweet and Lowdown) as Spindler.
  Originally from Dublin, Jason Barry has acted in a dozen movies including Titanic. As well as directing he will briefly feature as Roger Casement in the movie.
  “There has been much speculation about the identity of Jason and my first choice for the role of James Connolly,” says producer Nicola Charles. “But for us there has only ever been one actor for this role. Gary Oldman.”

  Which begs the question: why?
  Gary Oldman is a fine actor, as are Guy Pearce and Ian Hart, but – at the risk of sounding parochial – would it have broken their hearts to have an Irish actor or two in amongst the leading lights of the cast? It’s not as if the talent isn’t there – Brendan Gleeson, for example, has put together a cast that includes Colin Farrell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Cillian Murphy and Gabriel Byrne for his directorial debut, an adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s AT SWIM TWO BIRDS, which is due next year. And it’s not simply a case of the horrors shivering down the spine at the idea of Oldman, Pearce et al mangling the Irish accent, begorrah, as they go about their business (seriously, is the Irish accent really that difficult to get right?). It’s more that the Easter Rising was (my crass interpretation above notwithstanding) a complex, nuanced glorious failure, akin in its own way to the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae in that the main players knew they were doomed before they began, and words such as ‘complex’, ‘nuanced’ and ‘glorious failure’ don’t play so well in Hollywood.
  On the positive side, one of the writers, Brendan Foley, is a Belfast man, and the director, Jason Barry, was born in Dublin, although the fact that the other writer’s credits include writing the TV spectaculars ‘Forbes 20 Most Expensive Celebrity Weddings’ and ‘America’s Junior Miss 2002’ doesn’t bode well.
  Maybe, as I say, I’m being excessively touchy and parochial about this, but I don’t think I am. Can you imagine the reaction in France, say, were Chris O’Donnell slated to play Georges Danton in an epic about the French Revolution, written by Bartlesby O’Bonkers, whose previous credits included ‘Best Irish Tinkers Wedding Brawls’? Or if Cillian Murphy were mooted to play George Washington in a movie written by the author of ‘One Hundred Great Sweet Sixteen Party Hummer Limousines’?

The Popcorn Interlude: IN BRUGES

It boasts an Irish writer-director in Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh and Irish talent in the form of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, but it’s a Belgian setting and it’s funded by British moolah – is it strictly correct to call IN BRUGES an Irish crime caper movie? On the basis that we never ask where the wonga is coming from to fund the various Irish writers out there, we’ll say a tentative yes, and give IN BRUGES (jump here for the trailer) the traditional ‘four thumbs aloft’ verdict (above, right). Gleeson and Farrell play a pair of odd couple London-based hitmen ordered to Bruges after a botched hit, during which Farrell’s character accidentally kills a young boy, there to await further instructions from their boss, played by Ralph Fiennes. Lob in an art-house Dutch flick filming dwarves, a drug-dealing femme fatale and a jealous boyfriend, and you have the basis for a knowing romp that isn’t afraid to turn dark and twisted. The finale is a little too neatly tied up, and the convenient coincidences come thick and fast, but there are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, a breakneck pace, a superb performance from Gleeson, a beautiful setting expertly captured by cinematographer Eigil Bryld, and some cracking dialogue (“Retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids!”). Oh, and it also has Townes Van Zandt’s St. John the Gambler on the soundtrack. It wowed ’em at Sundance, and it’ll very probably thrill you too. Wanna see Bren & Col on the red carpet? Roll it there, Collette …

Crime Always Plays: In Which The Irish Crime Flick Comes Of Age

Crikey! Turn your back on Technicolour Talkies of Hibernia for two seconds and all hell breaks loose. First off, the trailer for In Bruges has finally arrived, and the good news is that it looks the dog’s. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, all let loose on the unsuspecting populace of Bruges in a hilarious, dark caper movie about two hapless hitmen on the loose … truly our cup runneth over. Elsewhere on TToH, Gavin Burke – for lo! It is he! – tips us off that director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name of the Father) is making a crime flick, Emerald City, based on the Irish mob of Hell’s Kitchen. Looks like the Irish crime flick is finally coming of age, people. Anyhoo, here’s the trailer for In Bruges – and we’re loving the tagline: ‘Shoot first, sightsee later’ …

Looking Good, Feeling Belgian

The Unquiet Man, aka Gavin Burke of Technicolour Talkies of Hibernia, reports that IN BRUGES is to open the Sundance Film Festival on January 17. Directed by Martin McDonagh, who won an Oscar in 2006 for his short SIX-SHOOTER, the movie features a pair of hapless hitmen – Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, right – on sabbatical in the Belgian capital after a hit becomes a miss. Despite the relatively tiny budget of €1m, TToH reports, IN BRUGES also managed to shoehorn one Ralph Fiennes into the cast – and while there’s no trailer available yet, TToH is featuring some handheld footage shot by a bystander while Fiennes was going through his paces. “In the background,” says the Unquiet Man, “and with the right kind of eyes, you can just make out Bigfoot.” Erm – you’re definite that’s not Brendan Gleeson, right?

A Bruges Too Farrell # 119: Annnnnd ... That's A Wrap, Folks

Actually, the exterior shooting on In Bruges wrapped way back in March, and right now they're wrangling over interiors, editing, who gets snapped falling out of the pub looking like a refugee from Knackeragua, etc. - our money (a bent three-shilling piece) is on Col Farrell, naturally, pictured left after an Homeric night's work spent grappling with the ketchup bottle. The movie, which also stars Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleeson, is the largest production ever to hit Belgium, according to Focus Features, who've obviously never heard of the Blitzkrieg. Ah well ... the movie, directed by Martin McDonagh, isn't due until 2008, but you can jump over here for regular news updates.