Netflixing: In Bruges

I spent the first reel of this film com­pletely bored, hop­ing there had to be some rea­son for this movie to be released com­ing up around any turn. Well, Once you give your­self over to the basic film­mak­ing offered up in In Bruges, you start to see where this film is doing a lot of things right. For one, Colin Farrell has a brief glint of human­ity, though not as much as he mus­tered up in Cassandra’s Dream.

If any­thing has proven con­sis­tent over the last decade of “inde­pen­dent” film, it’s that you’ve got to start with the less-clever-than-it-lets-on cold-blooded-killers-who-are-actually-like-regular-people semi-offensive-but-never-subversive black com­edy before you move on to big­ger and brighter things. And so, not miss­ing a step of his des­tiny, Martin McDonagh, of Oscar-winning Six Shooter fame, gives us this for­get­table speck.

In the end, I liked this movie far more than I expected (I had to sit through the trailer all year). Two hit men are put on leave after a shoot­ing goes wrong, and some­thing veiled as com­edy ensues. Once we real­ize (SPOILER) that Mr. Farrell’s char­ac­ter, Ray, acci­den­taly shot a child on their last hit, the film finally picks up steam. This plot point also allows the lead­ing Irishman to take advan­tage of his one pla­tonic asseet, those huge frickin’ eye­brows. The bounce and quicker above his sock­ets let­ting us know that some­one is home inside. Oh, I kid. He is ser­vice­able in this role, but oddly enough, the fur­ther away his char­ac­ters get from his native Ireland, the more I like them. 

Ralph Fiennes shows up later as the pissed-as-shit boss, Harry, with a rock solid con­science, for an assas­sin at least. It’s unfor­tu­nate that he isn’t given enough breath­ing room to make his humor really stick. He is dead-on hilarous in this role, but is seems Mr. McDonagh was more con­cerned with get­ting the jokes he wrote into the film than the ones that were so nat­u­rally avail­able with a delec­table tal­ent like Mr. Fiennes behind the wheel.

I have com­pletely left out Brendan Gleeson’s per­for­mance as Ken, the more expe­ri­enced hit­man sent with Ray to Bruges after the hit. His steady hand help keeps the other noise of the film in check. He might be a bit more for­get­table than the other two polar ends of the assasin spec­trum, but if we could pick one man to aspire to be in this film, no doubt most of the sane among us would pick Ken.

And how did it look? Meh, I would have liked to see some detail in the sky, uhh­hhh once. And the cam­era move­mem­nets were hardly con­sis­teny, espe­cially dur­ing the film’s snooze­fest of a begin­ning. Not mem­o­rable, but hey, I still saw their faces.