Dir. Martin McDonagh
Score: 6.1
Fans of Collin Farrell can rest easy on this one: He doesn’t have to be a leader of men, solemnly make decrees, or, most thankfully, wear a wig. In writer/director Martin McDonagh’s gangster comedy/tragedy, Farrell plays Ray, a twitchy, callow hit man from Dublin with massive ADD and more than a few psychological burdens to carry. Along with his mentor, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), Ray has been dispatched by their boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to the obscure Medieval city of Bruges, in Belgium, ostensibly to get out of London for a while after a bungled hit.
Farrell plays Ray like a fidgety cartoon character, tightening his mouth down small with indignation and releasing heavy sighs of indigestion, while forming a perpetual dense triangle of perplexity out of his heavy eyebrows. Ken, on the other hand, is an older man, much more calm and collected, able to enjoy the cultural sights of the town without compunction, if only for the phone call he’s dreading to receive from his boss.
If you like your comedies alternately bloody, irreverent and more than occasionally melodramatic, you might have a good find here. For the rest of us, while the setting is indeed a wondrous location, and the actors appear to be having a grand ol’ time (not the least of which, Fiennes, who appears more than happy to drop his usual Cambridge prof air to speak lines whose every verb, adjective and alternate noun are derivatives of “fuck”), McDonagh is, perhaps, a little too taken with plot-gyrating manipulations of his characters. By the bloody end, his characters are the recipients of ludicrous coincidences, surviving multiple shootings (and a pitch from an enormously tall Medieval castle) long enough to deliver their punched-up lines; and coming to terms with themselves shortly after stumbling onto the set of a truly dreadful-looking film shoot involving a hoary dream sequence of dwarves and people wearing animal heads. At least on set, the snow is meant to look fake.