If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2008)

For his first feature film, In Bruges (pronounced Broozh), Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman) has fashioned an absurdist black comedy about hit men hiding out in the medieval city of Bruges, Belgium, taking stock of their life while awaiting their next assignment. The film offers fabulous acting by a stellar cast, glorious scenery worthy of the best travelogue, and the characters' poignant metaphoric journey from cave to cathedral. Yet the story line about thoughtful hit men and the mobster's code of honor is artificial and self-conscious and contains some insensitive humor that comes off as more of an "I'll show you if you think I am politically correct" exercise than something intrinsic to the characters.
Colin Farrell plays Ray, an English hit man who botched his first assignment and has been exiled to Bruges by his London handler, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), together with Ray's partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The absurdity of having two mobsters trying to come to terms with a city full of culture and history is quite funny and engenders some feeling about being a stranger in a strange land. The culture unfortunately is lost on Ray. He calls Bruges a *beep* hole and humors Ken who is interested in seeing the sights and attractions of the old city. In the process, McDonagh goes out of his way to be offensive to everyone including gays, dwarfs, blacks, and women, and also dumps on Americans (a safe target), showing an overweight couple taken aback when Ray suggests that they would have trouble maneuvering the winding stairs to the top of a monument.
He paints Bruges as a city with Russian gunrunners and Chloe (Clemence Poesy), an attractive drug dealer selling drugs to a racist dwarf (Jordan Prentice) while an art movie is being filmed, but this has more to do with the demands of the script than the reality of Bruges. McDonagh's idea of humor seems to be his characters putting down the world around them. Ray calls the timeless art works "rubbish by spastics" and says he would be impressed with Bruges if he had grown up on a farm "and was retarded". "Do you think this is good?" he asks Ken "going 'round in a boat looking at stuff?" Neither have any idea why they are there. I guess if its Tuesday, this must be Belgium.
We soon find out that Ray is racked with guilt because he accidentally killed a five-year old boy who was in the line of fire as he was murdering a priest. Naturally he has no remorse for killing the priest because that is his chosen profession and he was only doing his job. The hardball hit men turn softies right before our eyes as they ruminate about guilt, sin, and the hereafter and question what they have done and whether it means they are going to hell, Ray says, "Aside from trying to live a good life, I have to reconcile myself to the fact that I have killed people." Fine time to think of that. While they do not exactly engage our sympathies, the relationship between the two men is touching and they deserve credit for being willing to reexamine the choices they made in their life.
One is forced to wonder about these choices even more when Ken turns up as an advocate of Ghandian non-violence after Harry emerges from London to act out his sociopathic "principles". What remains after the soul searching is a bit of a romance, some cool Tarantino-like hip dialogue, some obligatory chase scenes, and a contrived plot sequence involving a murderous ex-boy friend of Chloe who is blinded in one eye when Ray shoots him with a blank in self-defense. At the bottom of this is the gangster's Code of Honor that we are supposed to admire but never seems to be a part of anything real. Yet in spite of its infuriating flaws, In Bruges is always entertaining, and at times moving and does make me want to visit this entrancing city now that the lowlifes have been dispersed in true Shakespearean style.