Movie review In Bruges
February 29th, 2008, 8:55 pm Hobbies And Interests
If you could hoist a film on your shoulders and parade it through the theater for adulation and hoorays, the new British crime comedy “In Bruges” would be the one.Writer/director Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed English playwright of Irish descent, gives his characters a comedic voice so distinctive it forms its own profane dialect. His film punches and kicks like a precocious brat at the ultrastylish, ultraviolent gangster flicks that it spoofs, and its satirical spirit is married to heartfelt storytelling. It will leave you gaping (or grinning) in disbelief with a barrage of shocks, laughs and surprises.What an opening it is, crisp, concise and wicked. In a confiding tone, Ray (Colin Farrell) draws us close and explains, “After I killed him, I washed off the residue in a Burger King restroom and walked home to await instructions. Get to Bruges.” And there we find him, an Irish gunman killing time in the Belgian tourist town whose cobblestone streets, canals and cafes conjure an air of suffocating quaintness.Ray loathes the medieval podunk town. He mopes like a sulky schoolboy when his colleague Ken (Brendan Gleeson) drags him to see the sights. “I hated history,” Ray grouses as they tour Gothic churches and museums with tableaus of Judgment Day. Ray’s last murder went wrong - it takes us some time to learn how spectacularly, life-alteringly wrong - so he has cause to prefer amnesia.”In Bruges” is a film you can enjoy from many angles. Film aficionados will enjoy the elaborate homage to “Don’t Look Now,” a chiller whose evocative use of Venice’s canals is echoed here. Fans of absurdist humor can delight in McDonagh’s sendup of vainglorious actors in the person of a drug-snorting, racist dwarf; when Ray fells him with a James Bond karate chop to the neck, you think, well, he was asking for it. Others will treasure the film for its sheer lunatic novelty, hanging on for dear life as it veers from knockabout to deep sadness.Discriminating viewers will be in seventh heaven over “In Bruges.”
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