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The Guard (2011)

Brendan Gleeson is one of the best currently working and here he shines as an uncouth, mildy racist police office in a small town in Ireland who has to work with Don Cheadle's FBI agent on a drug trafficking case. Dark humor and inappropriate laughs abound.

Comments (4)

  1. MildredFierce Mildly racist?
    April 11, 2014
  2. wintermayer I have to admit that I'm intrigued as to which word it is that elicited the question mark, Mildly or Racist? If it is the one I suspect and that it is my use of Mildly, then yes. There are depictions of horrible racism in films like 12 Years A Slave or Mississippi Burning, then there are still quite bad but not as bad as those previously mentioned like anything that takes place in the civil rights fight. Then you get your garden variety racist caricatures like you might find in a lesser bad guy in an action film who just says one of two slurs and then gets his ass kicked. Below that you get something like this. A character who is a jackass to everyone and says a few things that touch on the border of being quite bad but overall is just a little small minded and probably eggs on the racial aspects of his interactions with Don Cheadles character more than he really personally believes, just to get a rise out of him. Hence the use of Mildly :)
    April 11, 2014
  3. MildredFierce I might have said indefensibly racist, but touché. The thing about the higher-ups in your racist caste system is that being racist is very typically the crux of their character. I found it more unsettling with Gleeson given that he was supposed to be so much more than a stock character.
    April 12, 2014
  4. wintermayer Very valid point. I guess for me Brendan Gleeson's inherent charm and abilities, even when he is playing someone like this, skews more towards scoundrel than outright racist. The fact that caste systems are so similar, in a manner of speaking, to racial hierarchies in peoples minds wasn't lost on me. I guess I'm somewhat of a character bigot :)
    April 12, 2014

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