An Odd Little Movie - by turns Funny and Inarticulate

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2009)

Isn't anyone else getting tired of movies that seek to psychoanalyze hit men? From Leon to Collateral, what makes cinema's hired assassins tick has provided mileage for many a screenwriter. The more we are secluded from violence and crime, the more our fictional fascination with hit men and gangsters as agents of retribution and honour has perversely increased. In Bruges, I think, belongs to this trend, allegorizing its ethical concerns through Hieronymus Bosch's famous 15th Century triptych The Last Judgement: a demented vision of damnation which, in the movie's final scenes, spills out onto the screen in the form of a surreal backstreet carnival.
The problem with these studies is that film-makers are chasing their own shadow: because cinema created the amoral hit-man, his character has no real-world location, and no portrayal of him will ever be fully convincing.
Martin McDonagh's script, for better or worse, barely dips its feet into this psychological subject matter, and Farrell's turpitude is only suggested by his despicable acts of violence. Those aside, he and Gleeson seem like thoroughly likable blokes and serve well as foils to one another. Had the film been an out-an-out comedy, their routine would have worked admirably, but time and time again it oscillates toward a half-baked moral agenda - which only serves to disrupt the tone of the movie. This is yet another film showing how the combination of gangland gore and comedy - perfected in Guy Richie's early work - is so difficult to pull of satisfyingly.
In Bruges is, consequently, an odd film that leaves an uneven impression. By no means without laugh-out-loud moments of gallows humour, it retains that penchant for self-deprecation and the absurd characteristic of British comedy. Bruges itself is naturally gorgeous. But nothing ever really rings true; the various themes of the story are not adequately developed, and the script barely scratches the surface of its dysfunctional characters, essentially a gallery of grotesques. It is perhaps fitting that the audience is left in a sort of interpretative limbo - Bosch would certainly have approved.