In Bruges Directed and written by Martin McDonagh Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes Classification: 18A
The setting is unique, the cast is terrific, the dialogue crackles and, if only there were a plot worth believing, In Bruges might have been a fine film. Instead, it feels contrived - often clever and sometimes funny but always self-conscious, one of those indie flicks where the damn quirkiness is plastered on and right in your face. It's like an architect making the gargoyles the centrepiece of his church.
The builder in question is playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh, who wastes no time borrowing a blueprint from Tarantino: two hit men bickering like biddies, the Odd Couple with guns. They're a pair of Irish blokes on the lam in, yes, Bruges, sent by a mob boss to chill out after their latest lethal work. Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is the portly veteran, Ray (Colin Farrell) is the young rookie, and they wander through the medieval Belgian town - with its canals and its clock tower and its brooding Gothic religiosity - like an unlikely married couple, the fussy old hubby with his petulant trophy bride.
So, toting his guidebook, Age takes a keen interest in the preserved past and in the surreal imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch, mounted on the museum walls. Clamouring for a beer, Youth rants and acts out and argues that history is "just a load of stuff that already happened." But the argument weakens in the face of his recent personal history. Seems that latest hit involved a tragic piece of collateral damage. The main contract got executed but, thanks to a stray bullet carelessly fired by Ray, so did an innocent little boy.
Behind his foul-mouthed patter and his insouciant antics, Ray is conscience-stricken, penned inside his own walled city of guilt.
In these opening scenes, McDonagh neatly flashes his playwriting skills, weaving threads of humour through a blended tapestry of menace and mystery. Of course, Bruges is the perfect background for this sort of tableau, and the town becomes a figure unto itself, an ancient fairy tale holding its poisonous secrets. Also, at this early stage before the contrivances dig in, both actors adroitly keep us guessing about their characters: A composed Gleeson hints at the brute muscle lurking within his touristy veneer of civility, while a twitchy Farrell does just the reverse, letting a measure of sensitivity and even intelligence bubble up through the rude-boy posturing.
Cue the self-consciousness. Things begin to seem false at the moment the twosome step onto a film set within the film. In Bruges's central square, some production company is shooting a movie, the kind that has a dream sequence featuring a de rigueur dwarf (Jordan Prentice). Suddenly the natural surrealism of the medieval place gets artificially doubled. The script just seems greedy here. And then it starts to look gimmicky and silly and, eventually, sentimental too. How does so much go wrong so fast?
Well, the convenient appearance of a love interest doesn't help. Ray hooks up with Chloë, a peddler of dope and purveyor of romance - they bond by comparing their shady sides. No more convincing is the abrupt thematic switch from homicide to suicide. That's just the first of many such twists, all of them suffering the same fate - advancing the plot at the expense of the characters, and eroding any residual belief we might have in the yarn. In fact, add to this list the complicating appearance of the mob boss (Ralph Fiennes with cropped hair and a mean accent), a tough guy dragging along a "code of honour" that just pours gasoline onto our already enflamed credulity.
By then, McDonagh has loaded up quite the ménage. We're faced with a clock-tower climax and a distressed damsel and a cranky dwarf and a flick-within-a-flick and, in a bit of narrative alchemy, a pair of whoring hit men whose once-leaden hearts have turned straight to gold. As for the comedy, it's still there along with our laughter, but they're at cross-purposes now, each falling on a different beat.
Admittedly, it could be that, when all is cleverly said and quirkily done, the picture is meant to be a deconstructed crime thriller, where the contrivances are a deliberate and ironic parsing of an unreal genre set in a surreal city. If so, kudos, but In Bruges should be careful what it wishes for - after all, your brilliant deconstruction is my dumb unravelling.
Opens today in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, and in other cities on Feb. 22 and Feb. 29.