The man who utters the opening phrase is Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), a sergeant in the Gaurd. He has what might seem to be a quiet beat in Connemara. But there are hookers and drug dealers to be found, which suits Doyle fine and not because he likes to arrest them.

Boyle's illegal pleasures are interrupted by the arrival of several outsiders. First are Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), a cop just transferred from Dublin, and his Romanian-born bride (Katarina Cas). But neither of them is as exotic as Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), an African-American FBI agent Boyle welcomes with brazen but deadpan racism. The guard also has a ready supply of anti-American jibes, some of them breathtakingly tasteless.

Everett is in Ireland because three smugglers (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) are headed toward the coast with "half a billion dollars'" worth of dope. Ever the critic, Boyle remarks that the figure is probably wildly inflated and the unknowable value of the alleged drug shipment becomes another of the movie's running gags.

As generally happens in movies like this, the by-the-book cop comes to respect the book-burner who's become his partner. But writer-director John Michael McDonagh doesn't just accept the Lethal Weapon format; he also continually tweaks it. This is the sort of fish-out-water story where one character earnestly informs another that what just happened is a fish-out-water story.

Helping the situation are the waves of amusing characters that McDonagh peoples "The Guard" with, such as a criminally savvy tot named Eugene and an IRA-affiliated arms man who wears a cowboy hat and drives an orange VW. The Irish, Boyle says, never forget, and this is one Irish film that will stay in the memory for quite some time to come.