King of the middle of the road

Larry Crowne
DIRECTED BY: Tom Hanks
STARRING: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Bryan
Cranston
CERT: 12A

Tom Hanks has long been considered the modern Jimmy Stewart. And there are worse things than that. Whether or not he likes that particular label I don’t know but he’s never done much to rid himself of it. Indeed, by playing roles like Larry Crowne, Mr Hanks only seems intent on cementing his position as Mr Nice Guy – the nice guy other nice guys call “Boss”.
The film is very much a labour of love. Along with the lead role, Hanks takes on directing duties and also co-wrote the script with Nia Vardalos ­ whose credits range from the good (My Big Fat Greek
Wedding) to the bad (I Hate Valentine’s Day) to the hideous (Connie And Carla). With Larry Crowne, she can add another adjective to her CV: nice. Or, to be more frank, bland.
Larry Crowne (Hanks) is a good guy, a pleasant retail assistant at Umart who’s probably won the most Employee of the Month awards in the history of the minimum wage. All the same, Larry ends up getting fired because he doesn’t have the education to qualify for a management position. Which makes perfect sense in some parallel universe, I’m sure.
So Larry sells all his stuff, trades in his car for a scooter and enrolls in community college ­ where his public speaking teacher is Mercedes Tainot (Roberts), a world-weary cynic who brings a bad attitude and a drinking problem to the party.
But nobody can be around our man Larry for long without some of that nice guy magic rubbing off and soon Miss Narky’s life is full of flowers and birdsong. She pulls up her socks, ditches her loser husband, falls in love with her favourite pupil and even becomes a great teacher. Of course, it helps Larry’s chances that his friend Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) insists that he get himself a makeover and transform from ordinary Joe to the man in black. A bit like Peter Parker’s dark alter ego, without the silly dancing.
And it’s all very… nice. Or dull and passionless, if you like, a bland vanilla concoction crying out for a bit of spark, a bit of edge to it, some bit of drama to liven things up. Like, I don’t know, discovering that Larry is really a serial killer, with the remains of seven other teachers at home in his basement, all of them in some way connected to his miserable childhood school years. To quote Chris Rock, I’m not saying I’d condone him but I’d understand.
No such luck, in any case. But Hanks and Roberts are a watchable pair who are charming as ever and there are worse films out there if you’re stuck for something to do.

The Guard
DIRECTED BY: John Michael McDonagh
STARRING: Brendan
Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham
CERT: 15A

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh will surely grow tired, if he hasn’t already, of being mentioned in the same sentence as his brother Martin ­ and so I apologise in advance.
It was Martin McDonagh who directed In Bruges a few years back, a film whose charms were lost on me then and have remained elusive.
It was widely praised, however, so anything John Michael did was always going to be up against it. Fortunately for him, his debut feature has gone down well with the critics. Unlike In Bruges, the film isn’t too bad, either.
Brendan Gleeson is The Guard of the title, Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a rogue Connemara cop, a man with more vices than a metalwork room. Things get a bit livelier around the place when Boyle arrives at a crime scene to find a man with a bullet in his head and the number five-and-a-half scrawled on the wall. Which is a bit unusual in his corner of the west.
The FBI are not often seen around the place either but soon Boyle finds himself teaming up with federal agent Wendell Everett (Cheadle), who’s on the trail of an international drug trafficking gang, who are on their way to Ireland with a big bag of goodies and had connections with the recently deceased.
If you can get past the usual eejitry we have come to expect from this kind of thing and you can ignore the dodgy visual quality that seems to infect Irish cinema like some kind of native disease, then there’s a reasonably decent comedy to enjoy here.
Some of the writing is very sharp and if Liam Cunningham’s criminal is one of the few strong characters, then Brendan Gleeson makes up for what’s lacking in all the others by making his cop such a memorable creation.
Boyle is the kind of man who should make the skin crawl, the kind of gombeen character that should no longer exist in Irish film but you can’t help but like and cheer him on. The excellent Don Cheadle, meanwhile, never emerges from the back seat and the underdeveloped relationship between Boyle and his dying mother is a lost opportunity.
Promising stuff, all the same.