Another embarrassingly awful British flick

Rating: 1/10 (30 October 2009)

Take an inauthentic theme (British "hit-men") and a ludicrously inapposite location (Bruges, Belgium), add an unconvincing love interest, and cook with a preposterous villain, and you get In Bruges. This film does not know whether it's a comedy or a tragedy, and works as neither. It breaks the solemn movie law by having no hero, and all its characters are thoroughly unlikeable. It is the quintessential entertainment made "by those who can do nothing, for those with nothing to do".
You can see how the basic idea could have tweaked the money-men's interest: three British psychopaths cause mayhem in quiet, picturesque Euro-town. Sadly, it reinforces all the ugly stereotypes of UK soccer thugs, refusing to speak the language and trampling over the locals. There's even a rude joke-situation about Canadians, just for good measure. So that's the basic package: buy it if you like it.
There's no point in going into the script: it's meaningless. The love interest is a lobotomised and marginalised figure, so women forget it too.
The main character (no way he's a hero), played by Colin Farrell, is supposed to have shot a child accidentally, and his partner is to execute him for it, something he never dreamt of. As in the rest of the film, there is no police presence around the killing, a thoroughly childish aspect of this boyish venture. Bruges has been chosen by their boss (Ralph Fiennes, who should have known better) because it will give the victim a little view of fairyland before he dies. The mawkish sentimentality is not just the Fiennes' character's, it is also that of the director, Michael McDonagh.
If it is not enough to have polluted the world to a wasteland, we have men dishing up this kind of mindless rubbish in the cinemas and on television. Dear, oh dear, oh dear....