After winning a Best Short Film Oscar a few years back, writer-director McDonagh makes a terrific feature film debut.
Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell star as Ken and Ray, hitmen lying low after a badly botched job. Their boss has sent them to Bruges, a Belgian city with lots of gorgeous medieval architecture. Ken is enjoying the vacation and the sightseeing, but Ray is bored and eager to get back to London.
The movie is largely a two-hander for Gleeson and Farrell, and both are very good. Gleeson is a charmer here, a warm and avuncular figure who genuinely cares for his younger protege, but the movie's real surprise is Farrell. He hasn't done a lot of comedy in his career, and it's a delight to see how funny he can be. There are also entertaining supporting performances from Ralph Fiennes (another actor who should do more comedy) as Ken and Ray's boss, and Jordan Prentice as an actor making a movie in Bruges.
At first, In Bruges feels like just another Tarantino-style buddy flick (albeit a very good one). The movie deepens as it goes along, though, becoming a surprisingly moving meditation on guilt, responsibility, and atonement. One of the marvels of the movie is how adroitly it handles its many shifts in tone. We zoom from slapstick to tragedy, sometimes getting both in the same moment, and none of it ever feels out of place. McDonagh's script is also a strong point, with characters popping in and out at just the right moments, and all of the stray loose ends of the plot being tied together very neatly at the end.
Highly recommended.
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