Similar Products - Protagonist -vs- Antagonist

The 2011 film ‘The Guard’ is a hybrid thriller film, as it is a Comedy/Thriller, and thus it presents us with the seemingly unconventional protagonist, Sergeant Gerry Boyle. 

Protagonist

Sergeant Boyle is an unconventional Gard in Galway, Ireland who, over the course of the film, helps to stop a major drug smuggling operation. With protagonists in thrillers one is often uncertain as to whether they are a ‘good’ character or not, for example, in the image below we see Sgt. Boyle taking LSD which he has taken from the dead body of the car crash victim. He has taken the drugs away because he doesn't think 'your [refering to the dead boy] mammy would be too pleased to hear about this'. Therefore he is in fact doing the dead boy a favour by getting rid of the evidence however should he really take away evidence in the first place? Shouldn't he have just thrown it all away rather than take any of it if he felt duty bound to dispose of it?

This could then lead the audience to think that he is a corrupt police officer, which to an extent he is, however at the end of the film he is fighting the drug smugglers with only Wendell from the FBI as his back up because the rest of his unit were taking backhanders from the drug smugglers.

The protagonists in thrillers are often morally grey as the often commit crimes ranging from drug taking to murder. In ‘The Guard’ not only is Boyle a drug trying Gard but he’s racist, very politically incorrect, sleeps with prostitutes and yet the audience still likes him.

From my research, I would venture to suggest that most protagonists in Thrillers are quick thinking, if not above average intelligence. In ‘The Guard’, Boyle would appear to be rather stupid however it is he who suggests to Wendell, who is the investigating FBI officer, that they check the CCTV footage in the local pub and finds the drug smugglers they’ve been looking for. Throughout the film he is able to produce valuable information for the FBI and proves that he is a valuable asset to the operation. Perhaps, Boyle acting stupidly is actually just a cover so that no one suspects him of actually being able to do his job exceptionally well.    

As he is a man, this automatically makes him a more likely Thriller protagonist, as the protagonist role is primarily a male role. In more recent years there have been more female protagonists in the Thriller genre but in general they are mostly male.

In general the protagonists in thrillers seem to have problems with relationships. For example, James Bond has a different girl every film and seems to be unable to start a meaningful relationship with any of them (with the exception of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service where he gets married at the end of the film but she is subsequently killed). Other examples of recent thriller protagonists with troubled relationships include: Jason Bourne (the Bourne series), Nina Sayers (Black Swan) and Cobb (Inception).
Sergeant Boyle is also a man with relationship problems, he says himself that he’d like to settle down but he’s too busy, “whoring it around”.
In addition to this if the protagonist does become attached to another person they are often killed one way or another: Cobb’s wife Moll in Inception, Vespa in Casino Royal and Sergeant Boyle’s mum in The Guard.

Antagonists

The antagonists in The Guard are a group of drug smugglers, Liam O'Leary, Francis Sheehy and Clive Cornell. Criminals are often featured in thrillers and not just in their own sub-genre of crime thriller. However, criminals in thriller films can appear as the protagonist in one film and an antagonist in another. For example, in RocknRolla, the 2008 film by Guy Ritchie, all the major characters were criminals, some were good and others were bad.

A common personality feature of antagonists tends to be that they are intelligent. This is certainly true of the group of antagonists in The Guard as they are interested in philosophy and quote famous philosophers throughout the film. The fact that they are criminals and interested in philosophy is strange and would be considered abnormal. Abnormalities in the antagonist is conventional within the thriller genre, for example, The Joker in Batman doesn't just cut scars into people's faces, as if that wasn't bad enough, he does it with a potato peeler.

They are manipulative as they bribe the Connaught gards so that they will turn a blind eye to the drug smuggling and they try to kill Gerry Boyle when he refuses to comply with their wishes.

Often the antagonist has some sort of mental disorder, Annie in Misery, for example, displays signs of having Munchhausen syndrome. In The Guard, O' Leary asks why it is him that has to kill Sgt. Gerry Boyle and is told by Cornell it's because he's a psychopath, to which O' Leary responds with, "I'm a sociopath not a psychopath, they explained that to me at Mountjoy".

Being a sociopath is really no better that being a psychopath but it does show that he is mentally unstable as he spent time in Mountjoy which is a large prison in Ireland, implying that he's been to prison for committing other sociopathic crimes before.

Although the drug smugglers are clearly the primary antagonists of the film, it could be suggested that the bend police force that Sgt. Boyle works for are secondary antagonists as they fit the role by representing a threat or obstacle to Sgt. Boyle by covering up the drug smuggling operation and feeding Wendell false information.