Movie shot in Galway wows Hollywood critics

Date Published: 27-Jan-2011

BY JUDY MURPHY

A film shot in Galway in late 2009, which opened this year’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival, is set to get a major distribution deal in America after it wowed critics and executives at America’s largest festival for independent films.

The Guard, a black comedy thriller starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, was written and directed by John Michael McDonagh – brother of playwright and film director Martin – is set in Connemara and was shot over a six-week period in Barna, Spiddal, Leitir Móir, and Leitir Mealláin, with some scenes shot in Wicklow.

It was chosen to open this year’s Sundance, the Utah festival which was set up in 1978 by Robert Redford’s company to promote smaller, independent films that were frequently ignored by the major movie distributors.

On Thursday night, it screened to an enthusiastic audience filled “with a who’s-who of acquisition execs from distributors major and minor”, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

That magazine’s critic Todd McCarthy raved about The Guard, comparing it to the “cinematic equivalent of a shot of fine single malt”.

The film tells the story of an international crime investigation descending on a rural area which is patrolled by local garda Gerry Boyle, played by Brendan Gleeson.

This unorthodox guard, who has a penchant for prostitutes on his days off, joins forces with Don Cheadle, a by-the-book FBI agent, in a desperate bid to tackle an international drug-smuggling gang.

Cheadle, who is best known for his Oscar winning role in Hotel Rwanda, is the total opposite of Boyle, so the scene is set for lots of humorous confrontation, with the reviewer from The Hollywood Reporter observing that Gleeson’s character got most of the best lines.

Trade mag Variety observed that, "it’s Gleeson who rightly owns the screen as a beer-swilling, crotch-grabbing, Derringer-firing crusader with one hell of a filthy mouth to go along with his heart of gold".

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.