Cynical and derivative

Rating: 3/10 (16 January 2009)

I wasn't going to review this, but a recent rash of award nominations together with encouragement from people like Barry Norman (the UK film critic) provokes it. A characteristically attractive central performance by Brendan Gleeson (too good for this material) and at least competent performances by Farrell and Fiennes conceal the profound moral emptiness and cynicism at the heart of this film, which blatantly attempts to assemble the components of a cult hit. Add a dash of Tarantino dialogue, the comic cinematic dwarf from "Living in Oblivion", the psychopathic geezer-gangster from Sexy Beast; even the title is probably a steal (though in different circumstances it could have been quite a funny one; American readers should know that there is a satirical magazine in the UK called Private Eye, a bit like your "Onion", and in Private Eye there is a running joke about an imaginary film called "They flew to Bruges", which successfully captures everything about the sort of worthy and desperately unglamorous black-and-white 1950s war film that you might doze off to on a Sunday afternoon's telly).
But look: it takes more than adding a few effs and jeffs to the dialogue to make you Tarantino. You have to have an ear for real speech to make this work. All we get here is just pointless foul-mouthedness, but with not one memorable or quotable line in the whole thing. Compare this to, for example, Armando Ianucci's "The thick of it" (A TV political satire), where a character hovering in a doorway is told to "Come the f*** in or f*** the f*** off"; now that's funny, creative swearing. In "In Bruges" it's just depressing and relentless. Still, the director and producers are enormously proud of their potty-mouths, as they devote a whole DVD extra to counting the instances. "Oh, grow up", is the only response I can muster.
These three central characters are two hit men and their psycho boss. Gleeson's character can remain appealing enough as we are told little enough about the hard realities of his background, but Farrell (the ostensible lead, with whom we are supposed to sympathise), is on the run in Bruges (this isn't a spoiler as it's clear early on) because of a "hit" that's gone wrong, resulting in the death of an innocent child (a choirboy, no less). Still, any moral qualms one might have about rooting for these dangerous sociopaths can be conveniently be put to one side because the "hit" that went wrong was on a priest who had been interfering with children. A paedo! So that's alright then; never mind that their more normal business is enforcing with violence the trades of prostitution and protection and drugs, not to mention narcissistic concepts of "respect"; he was attempting to shoot a paedo, so the collateral killing of a child is just another comic blunder.
As for the denouement, which I don't need (and can't be bothered)to introduce spoiler warnings for: preposterous, just preposterous. If the contrived ending had introduced some moral shape (even if just a subversive or nihilistic one) to the proceedings, there might have been some redemptive power. Instead, all it does is just emphasise the cynical way in which the ingredients, including the calculated taunting of imagined "political correctness", have been mixed together. Not to mention their sheer implausibility.
Not clever, not funny, not original, not satirical, not cutting-edge or black comedy, not even realistic; just a nasty taste in the mouth.