Ireland is a country I would like to spend more time in at some point.  I watch quite a few Irish YouTubers.  I enjoy Irish food.  I took Irish History courses in college.  Regrettably, I have only spent roughly twenty-four hours in the country, and that in Dublin.  It was part of the grand history tour my dad and I took in 2015, culminating with being at the 200^thanniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.  Dublin was our first European stop, and we were not all that impressed.  With what little time we had, we took one of the tour buses around the city, and it does not strike one as being overly interesting.  Such are first impressions, you know?  As a practicing Catholic, I was particularly disappointed by the fact that the majority of the old churches in town were Church of Ireland, the Irish equivalent of the Church of England.  This was an aspect of Irish culture that I did not expect.  They say that to get a sense of what the country is really like, you have to get out of the country’s biggest city, to places like what you see in The Guard (2011).  I earnestly hope that the rest of it is not like what you see in the movie.

The Guard is actually a member of the Garda.  This is what the police in Ireland are called.  Our main one is Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson).  He is a member of law enforcement in the Connemara district of Ireland.  This is where the “real” Irish culture originates.  Sergeant Boyle seems oblivious to some aspects of it, letting clear drunk drivers fly past his squad car, die by crashing into a telephone pole, and confiscating their drugs from their corpses for personal use.  This is the person that the newly transferred from Dublin, Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), has to work with in his new police assignment.  Aidan is shocked when Sergeant Boyle removes evidence from a murder victim they are called to investigate.  In turn, Sergeant Boyle is unimpressed by Aidan’s wild theories about other clues left at scene, like the “5 ½” scrawled on the wall in blood.  Aidan thinks this could be a serial killer marking the number of murders committed, the half coming from a victim who only lost their legs.  This is about as exciting of a day for police in this part of the country as they are likely to get, but it is about to get more interesting with the arrival of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).  He has come to Ireland to liaise with the Garda regarding a multi-million-dollar shipment (a half billion is the repeated number) of drugs about to be offloaded on the Emerald Isle.  Their interactions do not get off to the best start, with Sergeant Boyle assuming every racial stereotype you can think of about Agent Everett.  Furthermore, the next day when Agent Everett wants to begin the investigation in earnest, Sergeant Boyle insists on using his planned day off.  He spends it with a pair of female escorts to boot, while Agent Everett is stonewalled by a community that only wishes to speak Irish to him.  Towards the end of the night, though, they begin to bond over a couple of shared pints.  Eventually, they are watching security camera footage of the pub, the same one in which Sergeant Boyle’s suspect had claimed to have had a run-in with the victim.  In the background, Agent Everett notices Clive Cornell (Mark Strong) and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (Liam Cunningham).  They are two of the leaders behind the drug smuggling operation that has brought the FBI agent across the Atlantic.  Besides likely being responsible for one murder, we see them execute Aidan during a routine traffic stop.  Aidan’s wife, Gabriela McBride (Katarina Cas), comes to Sergeant Boyle to tell him that her husband is missing.  He says that it is too early to say that foul play is involved, but he has a sense of who is behind this act no matter what may have happened to Aidan.  Speaking of Clive and Francis, part of their plan is to buy off all members of law enforcement in the area.  They appear to be successful with all around, except when they get to Sergeant Boyle.  They even send one of the women he had recently slept with Sergeant Boyle to blackmail him with compromising photographs, but he refuses their money.  What this means is that he is now a marked man.  Luckily, he gets a tip from a recurring character, Eugene Moloney (Mícheál Óg Lane).  In the course of this boys constant wandering on a bike (a pink one with training wheels, no less), dog in tow, he finds a cache of weapons left in a bog by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).  Being who he is, he sells some of the guns to a shady arms dealer, but keeps a few of them for himself.  This comes in handy when Clive and Francis’ hitman, Liam O’Leary (David Wilmot), comes to kill Sergeant Boyle.  Using a Deringer from the cache hidden in his trousers, Sergeant Boyle surprises Liam, shooting the thug dead.  He then phones Agent Everett, who is on his way to Cork believing that this is where the deal is supposed to happen.  Sergeant Boyle informs the FBI man that Clive and Francis are still in Connemara, and that he is going to stop them.  Agent Everett arrives just as Sergeant Boyle is about to make his assault, and is handed an AK-47 to cover the Garda member.  Sergeant Boyle acquits himself well, taking out Clive and leaping onto the boat as Francis attempts to get away.  Unfortunately, the vessel catches fire and looks as if it explodes before Sergeant Boyle can escape.  We end with a wounded Agent Everett standing the next morning in the same place he saw this occur, with Eugene reminding him that Sergeant Boyle was a good swimmer.

I would have preferred a more definite answer to Sergeant Boyle’s fate at the end of The Guard instead of mere suggestion.  Then again, he is what one would call an anti-hero, and I have grown tired of such characters.  Still, I have seen worse.  There is one part of his character that is sympathetic that I did not mention above, and that is his relationship with his mother, Eileen Boyle (Fionnula Flanagan).  Sergeant Boyle had to put her into a nursing home due to her having terminal cancer, but he visits her often.  She is also in good spirits until the end, but I will get to that in a moment.  For now, my favorite part of their interaction is when we see him take her to Confession.  If only we had seen him go as well, but I guess we cannot have everything.  I am also guessing that her doing so is more the result of her Catholic upbringing than any sort of true faithfulness.  Perhaps this is me being cynical.  On the other hand, she does not talk like a practicing Catholic.  Then again, neither do the majority of the people you see in the pews on a given Sunday, or outside of a church.  There are those who consider me an “extreme Catholic,” as if doing anything outside of Sunday Mass attendance (never mind the Saturday vigil, which a good number of Catholics probably do not realize exists) for God is somehow not normal.  What is worrying about Eileen, though, is that she commits suicide.  This is tragic, and detracts from the sweet interactions we see with her son.

Regardless, Eileen is still a child of God, and may He have mercy on her.  The scene where her and Sergeant Boyle go to Confession in The Guard is meant to be more of a cultural activity.  The more disheartening part is that, like here in the United States, the Faith seems to be something practiced more by the elderly than the young.  Instead of watching this movie, pray for the Church that people return to it.