Cheap Trick to Sell Stale Dialogue

Rating: 2/10 (19 October 2008)

"In Bruges" has two things going for it: a tender, poignant performance by Colin Farrell, and Bruges itself, a city most of us don't pay much attention to. Other than that, the film is derivative and almost empty  I say "almost" because it does have some content, and that content is vile.
Colin Farrell used to be the next big thing, but that hasn't panned out, and he's made a lot of small, independent films like this one. I hope his next movie offers him a script worthy of the acting talent he reveals here.
Bruges is a city in Belgium with lots of extant medieval structures and museums dedicated to medieval masters like Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch. "In Bruges" just shovels Bruges on the screen; no art is exercised. There's no special lighting or setting or marrying of the film's themes or dialogue to unforgettable images of Bruges, its structures, paintings, or swans. "In Bruges" doesn't do for Bruges what a Woody Allen film does for Manhattan or any number of movies do for Paris.
Outside of Farrell's performance and the city itself, "In Bruges" is a rip-off of "Pulp Fiction" and "Sexy Beast." Rather than John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as talkative hit men, you get Farrell and Gleeson. Rather than Ben Kingsley in a contrary-to-type role as a vicious crime lord, you get Ralph Fiennes in a contrary-to-type role as a vicious crime lord. Fiennes is surprisingly uninteresting and not at all scary here.
For the most part, you get Gleeson and Farrell strolling around Bruges, trading low key, banal observations: Americans are fat, racist, and kill John Lennon and Vietnamese, beer is good, medieval art is deep. These observations are larded with the F word. So effing beer is effing good and effing medieval art effing is effing deep and effing Americans effing are effing fat effing. Oh, and since Gleeson and Farrell are Irish, and Irish people are inherently cuter and more interesting than anyone else on the planet (this movie thinks) their banal, F-work larded comments are all the more valuable.
And, of course, every twenty minutes or so the screen is spattered with blood as another character dies.
You get the idea.
Here's the thing  the director and script writer, the inherently cute and smart (because Irish) Martin McDonagh, doesn't know anything at all about crime or hit men or how bodies react to bullets. McDonagh doesn't even know the make of the guns he shows on screen.
But McDonagh knows that he'd never be able to sell a movie about two Irish accountants, say, or two Irish sanitation workers, or two Irish school teachers, strolling around a poorly lit (because this is a low budget movie) Bruges trading banal observations about how effing wonderful effing beer effing is, so he makes his characters hit men, and, voila, suddenly everything they say is ultra fascinating, or funny, or profound, in a way that it would not be had they been common working slobs.
This could be called the Big-Mac-in-France trick. In "Pulp Fiction," two hit men discuss the naming of fast food hamburgers. It's an incredibly banal conversation. The only reason the movie's largely teen male fans love the scene is because they believe the men having the conversation not to be John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, but two hit men, and hit men, teen boys think, are glamorous and inherently interesting, and so their comments about Big Macs warrant careful attention.
Putting banal, shallow dialogue into the mouth of an imaginary hit man who bares no relation to real life hit men in an effort to make his dialogue sound profound has got to be the cheapest trick in the book. Arthur Miller managed to make Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, the most fascinating character in the world  through Miller's brilliant writing. A great, or even competent writer, doesn't have to make his character a hit-man to make his words matter.