For a film by the brother of “In Bruges” director Martin McDonagh starring Brendon Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Mark Strong and Liam Cunningham, there’s surprisingly been pretty much no talk about crime-comedy “The Guard,” which debuted to mixed-to-positive reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, the film is set in the west of Ireland and follows Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), who finds his routine disrupted by the arrival of Wendell Everett (Cheadle), an FBI agent on the trail of cocaine smugglers. It looks like a rioutous ensemble crime comedy in the vein of Guy Ritchie‘s early work but with McDonagh — whose hopefully taken a few leaves out of his brother’s book — at the helm, we’re expecting something with a little more depth as well.
Irish thesps David Wilmot, Rory Keenan Fionnula Flanagan, Dominique McElligott, Katarina Cas, Pat Shortt, Darren Healy and Sarah Greene are also part of the cast with Sony Pictures Classics already picking up the film’s North American distribution rights. Here’s the full synopsis:
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 recognizes 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!
Unfortunately, there’s no embed of the trailer just as of yet so head over to RTE to check it out. Sony Pictures Classics are releasing the film on July 29th . [via Twitch]
