A compelling little British hitman character movie with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. The real star though is writer-director Martin McDonaugh, on his first feature outing after his Oscar award winning short.
McDonaugh started out as a playwright and he brings the same genius for stage dialog to the screen. Of course it doesn't hurt that he's got the stellar cast here to do it justice. Even Colin Farrell who I am ambivalent about, slips seamlessly into his role as Ray, the unlucky hitman who botches his first job and must go on the run to Bruges with his culture-loving mentor, Brendan Gleeson.
Together they create a strong central relationships as they battle the ghosts of their past in Bruges, Brussels, an atmospheric, medieval town that provides the perfect setting for questions of heaven, hell and purgatory. (Purgatory as defined by Ray: the place you go when you weren't really shitty but you weren't much good either, were ya? Like Tottenham.)
The plot is exquisitely laid out with even the smallest set-ups and pay-offs neatly dovetailing. Even the bit roles are far from thin. Best of all, for a familiar story about guys on the run there are plenty of twists offered up and Ralph Fiennes gets to chew the scenery playing a fierce baddie in the vein of Ben Kingsley's "Sexy Beast".
The only issue I have with McDonaugh and I'll admit my little sensitive soul may be reading too much into this...but boy does he love a race joke. I give him props for the political incorrectness of it, it's funny and my sense is that in real life-- not the sanitized Hollywood version--we do make a whole lot of inappropriate racial comments. But I did feel a little queasiness about the multiple white characters in the movie who traded so comfortably in racial stereotypes about black folk (y'know fat black girls, violent black thugs), though to be fair he did give one of the main characters quite unnecessarily a black wife. See, I even feel bad that I do that to creative work...parse the thing for some sort of evidence of racial evenhandedness.
(sigh)
Forget I even brought this up and see the movie. It's a good one.
"In Bruges" gets 4 1/2 Oscars out of 5.
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