Dir. Martin McDonagh, UK/Belgium, 2008, 107 mins
Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes
Review by Carol Allen
Anyone who has seen McDonagh's plays on stage ("The Pillowman", "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" et al), is going to expect his first feature screenplay to be both well written and with a fair share of violence. And it is both. More of that later. But what McDonagh also demonstrates in his first feature film is that he lives up to the promise he demonstrated as a director in his Oscar winning short Six Shooter in 2006.
Two Irish hit men, Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Gleeson), are holed up in the medieval city of Bruges in Belgium, sent there to await orders from their boss Harry (Fiennes) in London after their last job has gone wrong. The volatile and twitchy Ray thinks Bruges is the pits, his older and more phlegmatic companion regards it as an opportunity to enjoy the beauties of the old city, dragging the reluctant younger man with him through the streets and along the canals. The Bruges tourist office must be delighted with the way their city looks on film, although perhaps not so keen on the way the story filmed there develops. As Ray and Ken wait for Harry's call, we discover what is the job that has put them there, as they talk of morality, murder and memories and what is the real purpose of their trip. Along the way we meet a collection of colourfully drawn and original characters, including the perky wind up merchant hooker Chloé (Clémence Poésy) with whom Ray starts up a tentative relationship, their heavily pregnant landlady (Thekla Reuten), a dwarf film actor Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who hates being called a midget and eventually Harry himself, for a long time just a voice on the phone until he decides to go to Bruges himself to sort things out first hand.
Farrell and Gleeson, strongly contrasted in character, work well together inside their quirky surrogate father and son relationship, while Fiennes gives Harry a flat Cockney menace reminiscent of Ben Kingsley's villain in Sexy Beast. The dialogue is simply brilliant - heightened poetic prose with a blackly comic, mordant wit, which is inescapably Irish with occasional touches of Pinter's London voice in some of Harry's speeches. As well as being liberally peppered with swear words, it is also cheerfully and refreshingly irreverent and politically incorrect with regard to things like gender, race, drugs and disability, as in one particularly funny, drug fuelled debate about race and politics amongst Jimmy, Ray and two hookers. The story that unfolds is full of surprises, blatantly and unashamedly anti-American - though one of the most objectionable, apparently American characters turns out to be Canadian - increasingly and often startlingly violent with red becoming the dominant on screen colour and ultimately moving.
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