I love a movie with good dialogue, and when you get a movie written by a professional playwright who mostly works with stage plays, you’re gonna get some speeches. Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they aren’t, but I figure it isn’t hard to distinguish a screenplay that began life as a stage script. They just feel…different.
As it is, I got around to In Bruges before it left HBO at the end of the month, and it does come from writer/director Martin McDonagh, and the man does write a number of plays, so here we are.
Professional hitmen Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are sent to Bruges in Belgium. Ken knows why: he says their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has a job for them there, but he also thought it might make for a nice vacation. Ray had accidentally killed a kid while doing a job in a church, and he’s not in a good place. “Not in a good place” could describe all kinds of things here as he hates Bruges with the fire of a thousand suns. He finds the city dull and boring. Ken finds the place charming, and he’s really keen on the city’s canals, art, and a church. Ray keeps butting heads with tourists that annoy him, and the closest he comes to anything that can bring him joy is a romance with an actress named Chloe (Clemence Poesy) who may or may not be trying to roll him.
Ken, meanwhile, is just having the time of his life in the city he finds charming. However, Ken also knows more about the real reason Harry sent the pair to Bruges, and he’s not telling Ray everything right away. Bruges isn’t Ray’s idea of a relaxing vacation spot as it is, and when the best he can go for entertainment when he isn’t hanging out with Chloe is trying to befriend a little person actor, Jimmy (Jordan Prentice). And quite frankly, being personable and befriending anyone is far outside Ray’s skill set for most people anyway. Why, he may not be overly surprised when he learns who the actual target for the job is…
Now, as expected, McDonagh has a movie with a lot of great dialogue, often in the form of speeches even if I have a little trouble following Farrell speaking in his Irish brogue at high speed thanks to my tinnitus. It becomes very clear, though, that all Ray wants is to get out of Bruges. It’s his idea of a personal hell, and even when he tries to leave, something always stops him. Meanwhile, Ken is about the friendliest contract killer you can imagine, and Harry the boss, when he’s onscreen, adheres to a strict code of ethics at all times. These guys may be some kind of criminal organization, but they’re a very polite bunch with standards. Oh sure, they won’t hesitate to use violence (Ray especially when the tourists bug him too much), but these guys have a code of their own that they follow rather strictly.
The net result is a dark comedy with a lot of snappy dialogue. Sure, people die or get hurt in various painful and embarrassing ways, but the in the end, one thing is clear: no one really ever leaves Bruges.
Grade: B+
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