Credits: screenplay: John Michael McDonagh; director of photography: Larry Smith; editor: Chris Gill; music: Calexico; sound: Niall Brady, Steve Fanagan, Robert Flanagan; production design: John Paul Kelly; costume design: Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh; producer: Chris Clark, Andrew Lowe, Flora Fernandez-Marengo, Ed Guiney; production: Reprisal Films, Element Pictures, Crescendo Productions, Aegis Film Fund, Bord Scannan na hEireann / Irish Film Board, Prescience, UK Film Council;

Country: Ireland

Year: 2011

Running time: 96

Colour: Colour

Format: 35 mm

In his first feature, London-based Irish director McDonagh, already a terrific screenwriter (NED KELLY), tosses together a vulgar, irreverent, one-of-a-kind Irish country cop, Boyle (the great Brendan Gleeson), and a black American policeman, Everett (Don Cheadle), who comes over to the Gaellic-speaking West of Ireland to help stop a drug smuggling ring. Everett is there as a comic foil; this is all about Boyle, a force of nature, his id barely hidden as he addresses his unlikely partner with every African-American cliché in the book. McDonagh blends genres in this astoundingly gorgeous and rhythmically paced film: this is a riff on the Lethal Weapon-model cop partner movie, a black comedy, an action film, a sentimental drama, and, at the end of the day, a classic western, for which the frenetic, Spanish-style music by Calexico has been warming up all along.