The Guard (Cert 15, 92 mins, Studio Canal) Starring Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, David Wilmot, Katarina Cas, Rory Keenan. ****

Overweight, cantankerous, foul-mouthed and partial to a dalliance with the local prostitutes, small-town Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle is a directionless man you would expect to break the law rather than uphold it – which makes him the perfect, unlikely hero for this hilarious black comedy.

Gerry (Gleeson) is king of his windswept strip of the West Coast of Ireland and he’s more interested in booze than solving crime. However, when new deputy Aidan McBride (Keenan) goes missing and the officer’s wife Gabriela (Cas) begs for help, Gerry starts asking difficult questions.

Consequently, he is drawn into an international drugs ring. Straight-laced FBI agent Wendell Everett (Cheadle) turns up to crack the ring and the two forge a fragile alliance in the name of justice.

Gleeson savours every potty-mouthed tirade and there are some wonderful verbal exchanges with Cheadle as the man with the badge who takes one look at the finest that Ireland has to offer and wonders aloud, “I can’t tell if you’re really dumb or really smart.” He’s very smart, just like this film.

The Killer Elite (Cert 15, 111 mins, Entertainment In Video) Starring Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Robert De Niro, Dominic Purcell, Aden Young, Yvonne Strahovski. ** Ex-Special Ops agent Danny (Statham) and his long-time mentor Hunter (De Niro) are two of the most dangerous men in the world, capable of killing a target from hundreds of yards with a single shot.

When a renegade sheikh takes Hunter captive for refusing to assassinate the SAS soldiers responsible for killing his three sons during the secret Oman war, Danny sprints to the rescue, only to find he has been set up to carry out the hit list to secure his friend’s release.

Danny travels around the world in the company of ex-paratrooper Davies (Purcell) and gadget geek Meier (Young). En route, the assassins are caught in the crosshairs of Spike (Owen), leader of a secret society of ex-SAS officers sworn to protect their fellow soldiers from harm.

Based on Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s controversial novel The Feather Men, this hare-brained action-thriller would be considerably more entertaining if everyone involved had played the preposterous set-up for laughs.

Owen’s impressive moustache is more expressive than half of the cast, and director Gary McKendry happily reduces the screenplay to a series of car chases and fights over rooftops and in a hospital.