It’s being marketed as another comedy along the British-gangster lines of “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Layer Cake,” but Martin McDonagh’s “In Bruges” has more going for it than that. This movie is violent and sometimes funny, to be sure, but it has something else going on, too.
McDonagh is an Irish playwright whose work in the last decade has made him one of the hottest writers in the theater world. A couple of years ago, he directed his first film, a half-hour stunner called “Six Shooter,” and promptly walked off with the Oscar for best short subject.
In some ways, “In Bruges” isn’t quite as impressive as that film, because it conforms to some of the conventions of the Brit-crime genre. But it shows off its writer-director’s gifts nevertheless.
Bruges, the picturesque city in Belgium, is where two Irish hitmen have been sent to cool off after a difficult job. As they await instructions about what to do next, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) can only sightsee and spin their wheels.
Ken, a philosophical veteran of the trade, appreciates the old, watery beauty of the city, and eagerly drags Ray around. Ray, a young hothead haunted by something that went wrong on the last job, is insistent about his opinion of Bruges, a one-word assessment that can’t be reprinted here.
Word comes from their London boss about a new job. In the meantime, Ray finds diversion, in the form of a pretty Dutch woman (Clemence Poesy) who’s involved, in a shadowy way, with the making of a film featuring a dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice).
“It is a bit over-elaborate,” Ray says at one point, and McDonagh might be confessing something with that line. The movie can feel broad, and the shifts in tone from comedy to drama aren’t always smooth.
But McDonagh’s ear for shocking and funny dialogue is sharp. Most movies like this uphold the usual machismo code of such things, but McDonagh supplies a critique of it; when people start talking about “honor” in this movie, it will end badly.
It’s a pleasure to watch that beefy, ginger-haired marvel Brendan Gleeson (lately seen as Mad-Eye Moody in the “Harry Potter” pictures) in a nice juicy role, and Colin Farrell, although very busy in this part, seems just right for it. They get help from a crazily focused Ralph Fiennes, who enters the story at a late date.
If the film is uneven, it nevertheless has moments of greatness (one sequence, an instant movie classic, begins with Ken deciding to crawl up, instead of down, the stairs of a church tower). That’s enough to justify its existence.
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