Entertainment

Ace script in wild ‘Guard’

“The Guard” begins with a funny car accident (five dead), proceeds to an amusing mur der (bullet, forehead) and continues on a lighthearted trajectory across racism, drug trafficking and cop-killing.

How dark is this comedy? It’s a big hit in Ireland.

With his customary brio, Brendan Gleeson plays the titular cop as a dunce or possibly a genius. He may or may not be an Olympic swimmer and may or may not much care that three desperadoes are moving half a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine through the stony West of Ireland, where some surly residents speak only Gaelic. Or at least they pretend to. When an American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) arrives to display photos of the crime gang, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson) is puzzled. “I thought only black lads were drug dealers. And Mexicans.”

Your appreciation of first-time writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s acid sense of humor will rest on whether you find it funny when, for instance, the cop asks a little kid what he’s doing around here and the boy answers, “Heroin.”

This is a writer’s movie and, no matter that everyone thinks he’s a writer, it isn’t the same as an audience movie. The overall effect is like being in the room as a drowsy crime thriller plays in the background (drugs, killers, corrupt cops, whatever) while, in another film layered atop that one, all of the characters mock the pretensions of the cast in the underlying movie and digress into unrelated topics. Everyone is forever correcting one another’s language, interjecting trivia about Pol Pot and Kris Kristofferson, pausing to savor words like “blunderbuss,” wondering whether anyone interesting ever came out of Wales and averring that the derringer is a gay weapon. While other cops are analyzing a crime pattern, Boyle breaks in, “People are pointing. Must be important.”

McDonagh, unlike his playwright/screenwriter brother Martin McDonagh, who has created some of the bloodiest and most memorable plays of the past 20 years, isn’t much interested in the theatricality of violence. A cop shooting is handled in the most perfunctory way, as though even within the movie this is just the kind of thing that happens in movies. A bloody numeral scrawled on a wall as a major clue seems to mean nothing — and in the end, that is precisely what it does indicate. McDonagh might be wise to avoid the genre if he can’t even pretend to be interested in its conventions.

But McDonagh is your man when it comes to cruelly funny dialogue, and Gleeson makes it sing and sting. Perhaps the most memorably wicked line will be lost on most Americans. It comes when an IRA man (in a white cowboy hat) says there were gay guys in the outfit because “It was the only way we could successfully infiltrate the MI5,” meaning the British FBI. But we can all appreciate what Boyle means when he says of a colleague that he probably didn’t commit suicide: “He didn’t seem intelligent enough.”