When an international drug-smuggling ring shows up near Connemara in Ireland, the exceptionally local police get a little help from an FBI agent (Don Cheadle)… John Michael McDonagh’s feature debut gives Brendan Gleeson a role that could have been written for him – he absolutely nails it, with a deadpan performance as a racist, whore-mongering, hard-drinking, blunt Garda. Sounds tough, but he grows on you, which is something Cheadle also learns; he’s very good as the straight man in this odd couple. The story is a rough but very funny experience that delights in offending most cultures – but in a brighter way than most non-PC Hollywood flicks.
2011-Ireland. 96 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Chris Clark, Flora Fernandez-Marengo, Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh. Cast: Brendan Gleeson (Gerry Boyle), Don Cheadle (Wendell Everett), Liam Cunningham (Francis Sheehy), David Wilmot, Rory Keenan, Mark Strong… Fionnula Flanagan.
Last word: “Brendan read it, I think, within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. And then we went out a few days later to Don, and Don, knowing that Brendan was attached to it – he read it really quickly and said ‘yes’. So by the end of the week, we had the two actors. And I think the fact that it reads as a laugh-out-loud comedy – the film has more elements going on. There’s sort of a melancholy edge to it. And there are kind of cop thriller elements to it. But the fact that on every page there’s a big laugh, and there’s a lot of laugh-out-loud elements in the film itself, so I think people go ‘Okay, it’s a broad comedy, we’ll put our money behind that’. It’s something they could easily see. And so we went from around Christmas 2008 and we finished shooting around Christmas 2009, which is – anyone who knows anything about the film business knows that’s extraordinarily fast – really fast.” (McDonagh, Groucho Reviews)
