"Isn't vicious murder funny? Let's make a comedy about it."

Rating: 6/10 (3 March 2008)

Don't much like films made like this one. Ultimately psychopathically vicious, treacherous, and murderous but...."let's have big fun with it by making bloody murder and psychopathic hit men funny in the beginning before we get down to the real cruel blood and guts at the end"...... more or less a tired copy of one of Tarantino's films like Pulp Fiction, and it was mostly a one trick pony commercially calculated to depict sick but marginally entertaining segments of contrived and cruel human behavior including all the violence, blood and suffering an audience could stand for 2 hours without turning theaters into vomiteriums. The worst aspect of this film was that it shamelessly copied others in this genre who have done a much better job of it, like Tarantino, Peckinpah, and Scorcese.
In Bruges was two disparate films tacked together.....the first one was a goofy, near Monty Python sketch of a forced stay in Bruges, Belgium by two joking and wise-cracking hit men sent there by their head man to cool off after a botched assignment in the UK, and the second part was a cruelly vicious and bloody version of a typical Peckinpah/Scorcese/Tarantino film of terminal comeuppance and payback for treachery and nearly limitless earlier sins. The two film parts and the character's actions in each part did not match well and thus the result looked contrived and uneven overall and appeared to be done by one who has a lot to learn about what makes a film good, and that includes consistent characterization that he did not well control. And, it does not include shamelessly copying a story style done better many times in the past 40 years and essentially pretty worn down by now.
So, to me there was little substance that was interestingly new or different here. Instead, go see No Country For Old Men for this story genre done as well as it can be done. But, Bruges did look like a nice place to visit.