by Daniel Stephens

Created on: March 09, 2009

In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK/USA, 2008)
Dir. Martin McDonagh; starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes

In Bruges is a curious film from fledgling English director Martin McDonagh. It tells the tale of two contract killers holed up in the historic Belgium city of the film's title awaiting further orders after a botched assassination. However, interestingly rather than detrimentally, the film plays much like an action movie without any action, as if the more lively aspects of the plot happen before the movie begins and after it finishes. Unsurprisingly, it's because of this the film is hard to place in a conventional sense. And, ultimately, it's all the better for it.

Colin Farrell plays Ray, a man who has found his calling under the tutelage of hit-man veteran Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The pair check into a Bruges hotel booked for them by boss Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes) after completing a mission in London. McDonagh plays on the generation gap between Ray and Ken: they're like father and son on holiday together. Ray can't stand Bruges, it doesn't offer him any excitement. Ken, on the other hand, loves the preserved city and its historic buildings and picturesque cobbled streets.

But Ken sees something in Ray's youthful vitality that mirrors his own introduction to the world of contract killing. He also sees the pain and anguish that first got his young student into the game, and which was exacerbated by his accidental killing of a child on his first assignment. McDonagh focuses all his early attention on this parental-like relationship between the two hit-men, providing some lovely moments of endearing humour and poignant sadness.

The film's pedestrian pace shows its roots in the western genre. In Bruges is very much a thinly-veiled European-based western in the conventional sense: it has the anti-hero characters fighting a cause beneath the law, the one town setting which the hit-men walk into at the beginning of the film, and the final shoot out. But McDonagh never allows the film, even during the almost plot-less first half, to become an overzealous homage to a genre he clearly has affections for. With some wonderful dialogue, filled with cross-cultural humour, the film becomes that most cherished thing: an original character study that loathes to be pigeonholed.

McDonagh weaves his story around the two characters of Ray and Ken for the first half of the film with a conversational tone which highlights the harsh reality of their lives. On the one

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