Two Irishmen go to Belgium...

Rating: 9/10 (23 January 2009)

British gangster film: a genre that, apart from Guy Ritchie's films and Sexy Beast, has gone pretty much unnoticed for quite some time. So what makes Martin McDonagh's feature debut any different from the rest? What justifies its status as a really good gangster movie? Well, for starters, there's a lot of religious symbolism, which fits in nicely with the incessant profanity and occasional bouts of outrageous violence. Second, and this is the real selling point: it takes place in Bruges.
For anyone who's never been to the beautiful Belgian city (the official name is actually Brugge, since it's in the Dutch-speaking part of the country), McDonagh's film can serve as a satisfying tour guide, despite the consistent complaints from Ray (Colin Farrell), who calls the place "a sh*thole". Not that he is there willingly: he screwed up an assignment (he's a hit-man, you know), and so he and his mentor Ken are hiding abroad for a couple of weeks until their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) calls with new instructions. And while Ken laps up the gorgeous architecture, medieval streets and museums, Ray says that unless he was retarded and had grown up on a farm, there's no way Bruges could ever impress him.
Then, all of a sudden, Ray has an epiphany: a film set where the main character is a rude midget (Jordan Prentice). He bonds with the little fella, falls in love with a woman named Chloe (Clémence Poésy, aka Fleur Delacour from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), and starts appreciating the town a bit more (plus, a little cocaine never detracts from the pleasure). And just as things are beginning to shape up, Harry and his instructions show up for a "social call".
The stark contrast between beauty (the landscape) and ugliness (the language and eventual bloodshed) is the key ingredient of In Bruges' weird appeal. In fact, the two aspects come together when Ken and Ray are admiring a series of paintings by famous artist Hyeronimus Bosch and Ray just can't take his eyes off "The Last Judgement", a splendid yet shocking depiction of the afterlife. This is also where the film's underlying spiritual theme is unveiled: the two protagonists are seeking redemption, and Bruges is their Purgatory (although Ray has another opinion on the matter: "This is what Hell must be like: spending the rest of eternity in f*cking Bruges!"). It may seem a bit far-fetched, but then again the characters themselves describe Bruges as something out of a fairy tale, thus justifying the movie's surreal turns (not least the fact, and it's no coincidence, that the movie-within-the-movie is inspired by Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now).
But the real beauty of In Bruges doesn't lie in the setting alone: who's there is also a crucial element. Gleeson is, as expected, a tough but ultimately loving presence, and Fiennes, though ostensibly ripping off Ben Kingsley's work in Sexy Beast (but hey, so did Alec Baldwin in The Cooler), especially the language ("He swears a lot, doesn't he?" says Ray), adds an extra notch of creepiness to what is fundamentally the villain of the piece (of course, the main characters are all gangsters, so it's a pretty strange distinction). And then there's Colin Farrell, a revelation in spite of his being in the business for over a decade. It was a given that he's a good actor (just look at Tigerland, Phone Booth or Miami Vice), but the comic and dramatic heights he reaches here, with a deeply sad yet endearingly entertaining performance (for which he won a deserved Golden Globe), show that he's still got a lot to give, and it's an impressive lot, judging from this film.
Bottom line: In Bruges is brutal, filled with expletives, visually irresistible, boasts terrific acting and comes with a fascinating religious subtext. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but any lover of the gangster genre ought to check out an opus so postmodern that it actually has a conversation where one character asks two people to put their guns down and one of the shooters replies: "Don't be stupid. This is the shootout.".