AN SEAN GARDA: WHY BRENDAN GLEESON IS SO AWESOME IN THE GUARD (AND WHY I NEED TO LAY OFF THE BILINGUAL PUNS)

Brendan Gleeson in both The Guard and excellent company.

St. Patrick's Day is upon us once again. For deep contemplation of the holiday itself, I find once again unable to top my first St. Patrick's Day post, so read that if you like, but today we have very pressing business at hand. We gotta kick it for a minute about how good Brendan Gleeson is in The Guard.

He's kind of the final word in dopeness in that movie. From that opening scene with the drunk drugged-up douchebags driving, intercut with Brendan Gleeson being all reluctant to have to work and shit, to where he finds them after they crash and die (because of course they crash and die, THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK AND DRIVE, SHITHEADS) and sees that bag of E pills, fucking takes one, then looks out at the horizon and goes “What a beautiful fookin' day . . .” Tone, set.

I didn't even know whether he was a good or bad guy at that point, but I knew it was going to be a hell of a ride. And it was, through the murder investigations, the revelation that there's an international drug ring in Galway, the arrival of a straight-laced FBI guy (Don Cheadle) tasked with dealing with said drug ring, and the fact that Brendan Gleeson is just slamming pints, playing video games, menaging a couple hookers in the trois on his “day off” (Brendan Gleeson takes leisure seriously), and generally just IRL trolling the living shit out of everyone who crosses his path.

The Guard is less a police procedural (it's barely even that) than it is a character study, but holy shit is it an interesting character study. Everyone in the movie is a slight variation on a standard cop movie archetype (the loose cannon cop, the straight arrow partner, the other straight arrow partner, the widow of the guy who gets killed, the bad guys—the friendly one, the scary quiet one, and the wisecracking psycho—the hooker(s) with a heart of gold. . .) but in every case that slight variation is in the direction of greater depth. There are no dull characters in the movie, but Brendan Gleeson is fascinating. He's way overqualified for the life of a small-town cop, but nonetheless content with it. The encroachment of the baddies with their drug business and the FBI's investigation thereof shakes him out of his stasis, and forces him to live up to his intelligence and talent level.

The fact that we never quite learn what makes Brendan Gleeson tick is kind of the point. He might have finished 4th in swimming at the Seoul Olympics, it might be bullshit. He might not give a fuck about anything, or he might just have no reason to. He might, as Don Cheadle puts it, be “really motherfuckin' dumb, or really motherfuckin' smart.” But the evidence points to the latter. While Brendan Gleeson's ultimate fate is left a bit ambiguous, the movie ends satisfyingly because whatever actually happens to him at the end, it happened on Brendan Gleeson's terms. Which is as it fucking should be.

That's all I got, really. The Guard is great and Brendan Gleeson fucking owns. And as much as his character in The Guard likes a pint, he's enough of an instinctive contrarian to avoid going full retard on St. Patrick's Day, which makes him, more than any other character in contemporary cinema, truly a man after my own heart. (And if Fat Guy Nation ever needs a Taoiseach, Brendan Gleeson is fucking it.)