The Guard makes it number one in Ireland

The Anglo-Irish production THE GUARD has made a stunning debut at the Irish box-office, with a weekend gross of more than half a million Euro (over £450,000, with a screen average of close to £6,000), knocking “Bridesmaids” from the coveted No 1 position. The opening weekend results of John Michael McDonagh’s comedy thriller are comparable to other hugely successful Irish films such as “Michael Collins” and “In Bruges”. The Galway-set THE GUARD, a Reprisal Films and Element Pictures production, also picked up the Best Irish Feature award at the Galway Film Fleadh this weekend.

Optimum Releasing’s THE GUARD, in which Brendan Gleeson stars as an unorthodox Irish policeman who joins forces with a straitlaced FBI agent, played by Don Cheadle, to take on an international drug-smuggling gang, will open in UK cinemas on August 19th; a hit with critics and audiences alike at leading international film festivals Sundance, TriBeca, Edinburgh and Los Angeles.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door. However, despite the fact that Boyle seems more interested in mocking and undermining Everett than in actively working to solve the case, he finds that circumstances keep pulling him back into the thick of it. First his tiresomely enthusiastic new partner McBride disappears, then his favourite hooker attempts to blackmail him into turning a blind eye, and finally the drug-traffickers themselves try to buy him off as they have every other member of the local police force.

These events unwittingly offend Boyle's murky moral code. He realises that he needs to take matters into his own hands, and the only person he can trust is Everett. And so the scene is set for an explosive finale.

Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh (“Ned Kelly”) and starring Brendan Gleeson (the “Harry Potter” series, “In Bruges”) and Don Cheadle (the “Oceans” films, “Hotel Rwanda”) as the ill-matched pair of lawmen, THE GUARD also stars Mark Strong (“Sherlock Holmes”, “Kick-Ass”), Liam Cunningham (“Hunger”, “The Wind That Shakes The Barley”), Fionnuala Flanagan (“The Invention of Lying”), David Wilmot (“The Tudors”), Rory Keenan (“Zonad”), Pat Shortt (“Garage”) and newcomer Katarina Cas.

THE GUARD is produced by Reprisal’s Chris Clark and Flora Fernandez Marengo and Element’s Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, with Martin McDonagh, Don Cheadle, Lenore Zerman, Tim Smith, Paul Brett, Ralph Kamp and David Nash as executive producers. THE GUARD is a Reprisal Films and Element Pictures production in association with Prescience, Aegis Film Fund, UK Film Council and Crescendo Productions and with the participation of Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board and is distributed in the United Kingdom by Optimum Releasing.

THE GUARD will be released nationwide by Optimum Releasing on August 19, 2011