Belgian bungle

>> Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play
holed-up hit men in the mixed-up In Bruges

by MARK SLUTSKY

This is a movie that seems to want to be several things at once. In Bruges at times feels like a buddy road movie, a violent London gangster flick, a talky drama, a broad comedy, a sweet romance and even an intertextual homage to movies like Don’t Look Now and Touch of Evil.

It’s not a huge surprise to learn that the film’s writer/director is Martin McDonagh, the celebrated Irish playwright who wrote The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan. It also explains why the movie feels most comfortable indoors, when the characters are just sitting and talking, and why the overly cinematic sequences feel off. It’s a strange mixture of influences and styles, and it’s not very satisfying.

The movie is set, as the title indicates, in the Belgian city of Bruges, a gorgeous medieval town of canals, leaded windows and church towers. It’s where two hit men, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) hole up after a job in London. Something has apparently gone wrong, and their employer, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), has ordered them to this little town, of which neither are familiar, to await further instructions.

Which they do, for pretty much the first half of the film. While Gleeson’s character is more interested in the culture of the place, the somewhat naive and seemingly emotionally fragile Farrell is impatient, sick of the place from the moment they get off the train, more interested in chasing girls than looking at paintings. This is fine, but the movie starts to feel imbalanced as drug dealers, little people and guns enter the picture.

While McDonagh may be gifted as a playwright, he doesn’t inspire confidence as a filmmaker. You might be able to get away with indicating that a character likes a place by having him look over the town and declaim to no one in particular, “I like this place!” on stage, but surely there are more cinematic ways of conveying these things.

However, Farrell is actually quite good here, playing dumb and a little shell-shocked, and he plays well against Gleeson, who’s always great. But neither are enough to anchor the film as it gets into shoot-outs and gangster codes of honour and all that generic stuff.

In Bruges opens this Friday, Feb. 8