I was bored earlier, so I checked out reviews of The Guard online to see how they compared with mine. Turns out, mine is almost identical to Peter Bradshaw's in the Guardian. And Kim Newman's in Empire. And Tim Robey and Jenny McCartney's in the Independent. And almost every other reviewer out there.
Apparently, there is only one way to review this film (even though the scores span three to five stars). It has to be positive (95% on RT, and the few negative reviews are actually just sitting on the fence and don't reach any real conclusion. One even has the line "I'm not really quite sure what to make of "The Guard". Americans.); there are a lot of similarities to In Bruges, only In Bruges is better; Brendan Gleeson is excellent; the Irish racism bit has to be mentioned. Cut, paste, file.
Why is it that at least 60% of every review (and I'm moving on from simply The Guard here) is just synopsis? People watch the trailer to get an idea of what it's about; the reviewers job is to assess it. I've read reviews where the entire thing is synopsis, with one line of appraisal thrown in at the end. Awful.
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