Artsy Assassins

In Bruges Directed by Martin McDonagh

What’s supposed to be exciting about In Bruges, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s feature film debut, is the very thing that makes it dismal. In Bruges is yet another honor-among-thieves tale about modern-day underworld assassins. After Ken (Brendon Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) botch an assignment, they escape to Bruges, Belgium, where they rethink their lives. But instead of examining genuine, contemporary ruthlessness, McDonagh takes the “honor” cliché seriously. Beefy Ken resigns from the trade and tells Harry (Ralph Fiennes), his treacherous gun-toting boss, “I accept everything you’re going to do to me. I’m not fighting. I love you for your integrity.” That’s either sentimental hogwash or ironic hogwash.

It’s deeply insulting to movie audiences when an award-winning playwright thinks that this sub-Tarantino nonsense carries the essence of cinema in some way. Ken, Ray and Harry aren’t remotely plausible as killers, but they are recognizable from countless Tarantino knock-offs—especially British ones like Sexy Beast, Layer Cake and the recent Revolver where the banality of assassins’ lives (domestic boredom, wife and girlfriend trouble) is supposedly paradoxical. Natural moviemakers—even hacks—zip past paradox and go for the visceral thrill of fast-cut fight scenes, shoot-outs and elaborately gruesome torture sequences. McDonagh goes for artiness, instead.

You can tell from how little this cast of excellent actors uses their bodies—acting primarily with their voices, their faces nearly pressed against the camera lens—that McDonagh comes from the theater. This overly chatty genre film surpasses the Tarantino school of voluble snark. (Anybody remember those endlessly babbling chicks in Death Proof?) Ken, Ray and Harry explain and over-explain their anxieties and frustrations. Their jabber isn’t vernacular like Tarantino’s (or even Guy Ritchie’s); it’s theater talk: Existentialism is heavy on the tongue, the repetitions recall Pinter and the excessive profanity profanes Mamet’s brevity. “You retract that bit about my cunt-fucking kids!” Harry shouts at Ken.

McDonagh doesn’t have a movie hack’s low cunning; he uses cuss words and tough talk to expose the sensitivity inside hitmen. Not only is this anathema to the genre, it’s also false to the basic concept of how Ken and Ray encounter the morality they’ve run away from in Bruges’ heavily symbolic milieu of churches, bridges, canals and art museums—that’s where Hieronymus Bosch’s hellish visions remind them where they are morally. McDonagh trades old-fashioned Catholic guilt for movie-based dread and sarcasm. Touch of Evil is on the telly and Ray flirts with a blonde drug-dealer on a movie set who says Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now inspires the on-location shooting. “Pastiche is too strong,” Ray says. “It’s an homage.” These movie references show how far behind a theater professional like McDonagh is from the contemporary moral complexity of films like Luc Besson’s sexy, atmospheric production Hitman and Philip G. Atwell’s highly kinetic feature debut War—both underworld crime dramas where furious action clarified the struggle among friends, enemies, nations and races without McDonagh’s bogus sentimentality. (A dwarf snorts coke with Ken and Ray.) Our film culture gets deranged when ace action movies like Hitman and War are ignored but white elephants like In Bruges get serious Sundance recognition.

At least the trio of stars earns their money. Fiennes does Ben Kingsley’s sexy beast the way it should have been—lean rudeness, no hammy fat. Farrell’s lost-boy guilt shows the social roots Woody Allen missed in Cassandra’s Dream. And Gleeson’s Ken hides turmoil and shy love for Ray inside his hitman’s fatigue. Looking at the consequences of his life through one large, teary eye, he inspires enormous pathos like Ferdinand the Bull—more than McDonagh’s violent pastiche deserves.