In Dutch

Rating: 7/10 (11 May 2008)

I hope Martin McDonagh is cutting Harold Pinter in for a piece of the gate on this. Not content with ripping-off Pinter's two-hander The Dumb-Waiter (in case you didn't see it that's the one where two hit man are killing time - sorry about that - whilst waiting to learn their next assignment which turns out to be for one to snuff the other) and extending it he also 'borrows' the Pinter style of dialogue. This doesn't make it a bad film but it does make it unoriginal. I don't know what it is with Irish writers and rip-offs: It's not so long since one of them wrote something called Dancing At Lughnasa which featured a dysfunctional family living in the Depression with a son walking out of the action to spout linking narrative and then returning to the action. Nothing wrong with that IF Tennessee Williams hadn't done the same thing years earlier in The Glass Menagerie. Anyway back to Bruges where Colin Farrell is being as un PC as it's possible to be - and I have absolutely no problem with that. If nothing else we get some great scenery and that with the fairly decent acting makes it worth seeing even if McDonagh is only The Caretaker for Pinter.