Hell isn't Bruges... It's this excrement of a movie (SPOILERS)

Rating: 1/10 (23 July 2008)

In Bruges is so relentlessly, mind-bogglingly bad, it's a miracle anyone was stupid enough to put up money for this piece of crap. Not only does it take forever to get going, is it full of people doing completely unbelievable things, does it completely fail to capture the spirit of Bruges and its inhabitants (and believe me, there's plenty material there which can be parodied mercilessly if one is so inclined), but worst of all it doesn't even know what it wants to say. And it's pretentious, to boot.
The romance is ridiculous, the midget/dwarf character is only there to function as the punchline of a sick joke-oid (which really isn't funny or profound or thought-provoking). None of the secondary characters are believable (a pregnant woman ordering an armed gangster out of her hotel - without showing the slightest worry or fear, for instance, or someone piloting a boat down the canals of Bruges who doesn't react when someone leaps onto his boat from a hotel window and bullets start flying), they're badly written and acted, and except for the ticket seller none of them are Flemish (let alone from Bruges). They're mainly French speakers - why, for Christ's sake? There are hundreds of Flemish actors and a few dozen of them are actually quite good.
Script-wise, the problem is that the jokey tone of many of the scenes completely clashes with the extreme tragedy of what Colin Farrell's character has done. And once this horror is revealed (which makes it very hard to empathize with him at first), absurd crime situations and 'cool' bits of ultra-violence just don't fit with the overall tone. This should be a story of either reprisal or redemption, but it ends up being neither and both. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more ludicrous, with the scene in the hotel between Farrell, Fiennes and the landlady as the absolute nadir. There's also some quite shocking gore (a boy with his brains blown out, a character with half his face blown off)
On the plus side, Farrell (whom I really, really hate, normally) is extremely good, Brendan Gleeson also does a good job, and Ralph Fiennes does his best with a very ill-conceived role. And some of Farrell's rants and jokes are amusing. But the weaknesses of the script and the weak acting of the rest of the cast make this an unalloyed disaster.
Too bad McDonagh didn't jump off the Belfort instead of Gleeson's character. Then the world would have been spared this travesty of a film.