Geek Tyrant Review:
The humor in this film is very reminiscent of In Bruges: subtle and equally as funny in its silences as its outbursts. McDonagh was able to craft a buddy cop film that plays on the genre's conventions and subverts them often enough to cause even the most cynical audience member to raise an eyebrow. Much like Shane Black's wonderful Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the characters in this film feel as if they know they're in a movie. Boyle wonders aloud why cops don't put out APB's anymore; thugs drop ridiculous one liners amongst themselves and are called out by fellow thugs about how their lines don't make any sense; a man asks Everett if the phrase “liquidate people” means mobsters actually turn people into liquid. (There's also a gag with a Derringer that was straight out of KKBB.) This self-awareness reminded me a lot of Hot Fuzz and the way Edgar Wright was able to both comment on and add to the buddy cop genre at the same time;The Guard does the same thing, though leans a bit more on the darker side than Wright's exuberant celebration of excess.
and the Plot:
Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town Irish 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 drug-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door.
Boyle drifts through life, not much concerned about anything, not even the mysterious murder of a man in one of the town's holiday cottages. But when Everett shows Boyle the mugshots of four drug traffickers, he recognises one of them as the dead man.
And so the two cases converge, with a bemused Everett finding himself adrift in the decidedly original and sometimes surreal world of Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the last of the independents!
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