Editor Reviews:

Description:
Colin Farrell and Academy Award-nominee Ralph Fiennes star in this edgy, action-packed comedy, filled with thrilling chases, spectacular shoot-outs and an explosive ending you won't want to miss!

Hit men Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson, Harry Potter) have been ordered to cool their heels in the storybook city of Bruges (it's in Belgium) after finishing a big job. But since hit men make the worst tourists, they soon find themselves in a life & death struggle of comic proportions against one very angry crime boss (Fiennes)!

Get ready for the outrageous and unpredictable fun you will have In Bruges, the movie critics are calling, "wildly entertaining" - Stephen Rebello, Playboy.

Amazon.com:
The considerable pleasures of In Bruges begin with its title, which suggests a glumly self-important art film but actually fits a rattling-good tale of two Irish gangsters "keepin' a low profile" after a murder gone messily wrong. Bruges, the best-preserved medieval town in Belgium, is where the bearlike veteran Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and newbie triggerman Ray (Colin Farrell) have been ordered by their London boss to hole up for two weeks. As the sly narrative unfolds like a paper flower in water, "in Bruges" also becomes a state of mind, a suspended moment amid centuries-old towers and bridges and canals when even thuggish lives might experience a change in direction. And throughout, the viewer has ample opportunity to consider whose pronunciation of "Bruges" is more endearing, Gleeson's or Farrell's. The movie marks the feature writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, whose droll meditation on sudden mortality, Six Shooter, copped the 2005 Oscar for best live-action short. Although McDonagh clearly relishes the musicality of his boyos' brogue and has written them plenty of entertaining dialogue, In Bruges is no stageplay disguised as a film. The script is deceptively casual, allowing for digressions on the newly united and briskly thriving Europe, and annexing passers-by as characters who have a way of circling back into the story with unanticipatable consequences. That includes a film crew--shooting a movie featuring, to Ray's fascination, "a midget" (Jordan Prentice)--and a fetching blond production assistant (Clémence Poésy) whose job description keeps evolving. There's one other key figure: Harry, the Cockney gang boss whose omnipotence remains unquestioned as long as he remains offscreen, back in England, as if floating in an early Harold Pinter play. Harry has reasons inextricably tender and perverse for selecting Bruges as his hirelings' destination, and eventually he emerges from the aether to express them--first as a garrulous telephone voice and then in the volatile form of Ralph Fiennes. By that point the charmed moment of suspension, already shaken by several irruptions of violence, is pretty well doomed. But In Bruges continues to surprise and satisfy right up to the end. --Richard T. Jameson

Rating : - Dark Comedy "In Bruges" Makes Good Use of Farrell's Irish Brogue Chops


International actors working in Hollywood can often charm and persuade us when featured in big-budget blockbuster films. But in movies that showcase their best qualities in their native tongues--or accents--with scripts closer to wherever they call home, they sometimes shine and dazzle in ways that astound us. That seems to be the case with Colin Farrell as the emotionally wired Irish hit-man Ray in director Martin McDonagh's dark and twisted comedy, In Bruges.

If Farrell has made a name for himself (not to mention some very decent salaries) based more on his "hunk factor" and previous bad-boy image than his talent, his performance in this film reveals him to be a gifted actor indeed. Arguably, it may very well be his finest since his turn as the American soldier Private Roland Bozz in director Joel Schumacher's troubling war film, Tigerland. His role for In Bruges could not be more different. As the comfortably Irish-brogue speaking Ray, he joins fellow hit-man Ken (performed brilliantly by Brendan Gleeson of Harry Potter fame) for his first kill in the small elegant city of Bruges in Brussels. Naturally it goes all wrong and in the course of murdering his intended target--a priest, actually--he accidentally kills a child.

Whereas he feels no remorse over killing the priest, who may or may not have been guilty of some monstrous transgression, the death of the child breaks a code of hit-man honor for which Ray cannot forgive himself. Neither can Ralph Fiennes as Harry Waters, the man who hired him. Distraught and suicidal, Ray nevertheless pursues a romance with the beautiful Chloe (Clemence Poesy) whom he considers a wonderfully nice girl because in her own drug-dealing way she's every bit as gangster as he is. She even forgives him when he steals her illicit stash of pharmaceuticals and goes on a partying binge with partner Ken and the aloofly arrogant movie star dwarf named Jimmy, played impressively by Jordan Prentice.

As amazingly weird and macabre as In Bruges is, the movie in its essence--right up to the shocking end-- is mostly about exercising respect for established principles, and the struggle to preserve a sense of innocence in a world where innocence is literally murdered every day. Like Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes deliver exceptional performances in their portrayals of complicated characters who are brutally ruthless and yet, at the same time, unnervingly sensitive and emotionally vulnerable. We somehow find ourselves empathizing with them when probably we should be denouncing them, and laughing when it might make more sense to shed a tear or two.


by Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of The American Poet Who Went Home Again
and Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World