The Guard (2011)

Brendan Gleeson's comic timing is nothing new, but in The Guard he truly shows his abilities to deliver a deadpan line and make the audience roar with laughter. There were plenty of laughters yesterday at the cinema as Gleeson's smart-or-dumb Garda delivers one racist joke after another. The characters that crowd his small world try too hard to keep up with him, but he takes the film away and carries it on his broad shoulders.

Yet, something is amiss ... and that's the story. Despite the jokes, Gleeson's performance and the idyllic (and rainy) Irish setting doesn't make this more than a TV movie that is a little above average.

Perrier's Bounty (2009)

Perrier's Bounty is not the Irish Snatch (somebody, somewhere must have made this porno), but somehow I wish it was. What starts off as an off-beat, super-fast paced pseudo-gangster flick turns into a bloated, unfunny mess that makes absolutely no sense.


Cillian Murphy (one of our favourite actors here at Cinewise) plays Michael McCrea. He owes money to the local mob boss Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson, who gives his usual best) and unless he pays by midnight, two of his goons will break his bones. Desperate, he asks a loan-shark to help him out and gets involved in a break-in, which ends up a blackmail operation that will earn him more money than he owes. So far so good. However, when he misses the deadline at midnight the two goons show up at his door to break his bones. Michael's neighbour - freshly dumped by boyfriend, literally girl-next-door - kills one of them in the hallway. Now Michael not only owes money to Perrier, but he is also involved in the death of one of his men. With the help of his voluntary-insomniac father ('the Reaper' told him that next time he falls asleep he will die - cue Jim Broadbent munching on Nescafe straight from the jar) they bury the body up on a hill overlooking Dublin. In order to avenge his fallen man, Perrier puts a bounty on Michael's head, unbeknownst to the trio.