"If I'd grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me," says Colin Farrell's character, Ray, a few scenes into In Bruges. He looks uncomfortable, more so than his character calls for, making it obvious that Ray has some growing to do. And that growing comes on that tails of one blood-filled shootout after another.
The crafty editing of In Bruges's punchy, laugh-a-minute, fast-paced trailer advertised a movie far unlike the slow-moving, dark comedy (heavy on the dark) that it is. I should have known better.
In the last year I've seen three movies from "across the pond" whose lumbering style (The Queen, History Boys and Venus) has bored me to tears despite brilliant casts, Oscar nominations, semi-entertaining plots and sometimes stunning cinematography.
Judging by the trailer I thought that In Bruges would be more like Edgar Wright's and Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, movies that mock American-style genre-flicks brilliantly. I was painfully mislead.
Martin McDonagh, the unbelievably talented writer and director of In Bruges, has a dark side, and it works for him. It works really well.
At 38, his plays and films have won him an Academy Award (for the short film Six Shooter), several Tony awards and numerous other accolades. At 27, four of his plays ran simultaneously in London's West End. He is the first playwright since Shakespeare to achieve this feat.
Unfortunately, he didn't quite hit it with this, his first feature-length film. His writing was spot-on, if a little underwritten.
The jokes were sharp, fresh and intelligent, but the sad, brooding music they lay over it made the audience afraid to laugh.
One scene in particular featured a miserable Ferrell, hunched with cold, zipping through Bruges canals in a boat, complaining the entire time while Ken (Brendan Gleeson) cheerfully takes in the medieval architecture.
A scene that should've held a visual punch and produced a good laugh, fizzled under the impending doom that McDonagh painted into each shot.
The gloom is not unwarranted. Ken and Ray are London hitmen; Ray has recently botched his first assignment and Ken, the good-natured and lovable experienced killer, is keeping him in Bruges under the strict orders of a faceless boss named Harry (whose face is later revealed as none other than Ralph Fiennes). The two spend their days sight-seeing and keeping a relatively low profile until they stumble onto a movie set and meet a racist little person (Jordan Prentice) and his enchanting coke/acid/ketamine dealer Chlo? (Clémence Poésy, or Fleur Delacour of Harry Potter fame). It is only after Ray and Chlo?'s eventful first date that the movie starts to pick up speed.
At no point can the movie blame its actors for its shortcomings. Each actor was perfectly selected for their role and, with a few exceptions, delivered them flawlessly.
Farrell was one of the exceptions. He wasn't flawless, but he did get close to it. At first, it was an uncomfortable match. Ray's character called for depth and layers of maturity that Farrell had yet to display with some of his previous one-dimensional roles.
Farrell himself was unsure of his appropriateness for the role and reportedly turned it down, thinking his reputation would ruin the well-written character. It's unfortunate that this was a factor initially.
Yet as Ray's character unfolds, so do Farrell's chops as an actor. He is more than a frowning action-hero; he can give us comedy and pain (if not at first). Farrell slowly introduces us to the real Ray, but his start is shaky and doesn't really cement itself until the very end.
Poésy has a small role but is absolutely delightful in it (as her con-artist character should be).
McDonagh has a disturbing knack for making the audience feel, really feel, for the "bad guys" and even the "really bad guys," and the actors he chose were of a caliber to bring that to life.
Ray killed a preacher and a young boy and punched a woman in the face. We should feel sorry for the victims of his bravado, but instead we pine for this furry-browed boy who is realizing the quality of life for the first time.
By the middle of the movie the audience forgets that Gleeson's Ken is actually one of those really bad guys.
At one point his sobering story of his wife's death almost draws tears during a giddy orgy of drugs and prostitutes. Even Fiennes, who brought a little Voldemort to his character, gives Harry a realistic quality at the climax of the dramatic shootout that ends with an unexpected, but strangely believable, twist of fate. The job of a hitman is to kill people, but they are men first, and McDonagh knows what it takes to expose their ethics.
Where does the film fall short of greatness? I've already mentioned the tone affecting the comedic gems but the real issue is that McDonagh hasn't found his own style yet. Instead he relies on the standard style coming out of the U.K. right now.
When Guy Ritchie made Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, 10 other movies came out just like it.
Now we have this "thriller" movie that might be considered thrilling to a 90-year-old with a walker, but it doesn't quite keep the pace of today's cinematography.
The final sequence is filled with heavy metal music and jump-out-the-window-and-onto-a-moving-object getaway bits and is really the only point where the relatively action-filled movie actually sprints.
I'm not asking for a movie full of this (the writing is far too good for that) but maybe a little more of it spread throughout. Some scenes are just so slow that it's hard to believe the time span it occurs in (most notably the showdown in the tower).
The disappointment of misleading advertising took a long time to wear off, especially as the movie lingered in its exposition scenes. One can't discredit the movie entirely though because the screenplay is so solid and intelligent without imposing itself too much. McDonagh doesn't have it perfect, yet, but he has the tools and he has the right actors in tow to make it happen in the future.
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