Susan Year Itch

In Bruges: We had a beautiful moment, Colin, don’t ruin it.

Rating:

All my pals responded with enthusiastic yawns when I said I had In Bruges at home from Netflix, so I put it off for like a month. What a dumb month that was. What was I doing all that time, playing Zelda and reading fantasy novels? Please. I could have spent that 30 days watching a delightfully bloody and weird black comedy (the best kind of comedy??), in which Mad-Eye Moody and Voldemort play around with guns while Colin Farrell makes Ron Weasley-like eyebrow movements.

But that's where the Harry Potter similarities end.

JK, they totally continue! Mad-Eye and Ron, otherwise known as Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (formerly-disgusting-but-suddenly-cute-as-a-button Farrell), may be hit men instead of wizards, but the Belgian town of Bruges, in which they are hiding out after a botched job, is bursting with medieval appeal, a veritable "Hogwarts," if you will. A f***ing fairyland.*

The contrast between bloody killers (with hearts of gold, of course) and a city that seriously looks like you could eat it for dessert provides much of the humor. To Ken, who's more seasoned and less skittish than the young, dashing, and idiotic Ray, this unplanned stopover in Bruges is something to savor. He drinks in the history and feasts his eyes on beautiful spires of1500 year old churches while Ray, who is in danger of unraveling with nerves, views Bruges as the worst sort of purgatory imaginable, a quaint one where nothing happens. That is, until he realizes that someone is filming a movie in Bruges - and one that involves a dwarf! Let the fun begin!

Martin McDonagh's first movie, In Bruges doesn't blow up traditional plot conflicts or anything. Putting unlikely people in an unlikely setting is pretty tried but true, and McDonagh managed to put together a great script and also to hire talent that you don't see every day. Especially from these blokes. I'm not saying these actors haven't earned their stripes (well, I sort of am saying that about Farrell), but let's admit that we've come to expect certain things from certain people. Ray and Ken's boss, the verbally inappropriate Harry (Ralph Fiennes), pays a nice visit to this charming town, in an attempt to clean up some messes and stalk around moodily. Fiennes is no stranger to playing a moody asshole, but folks seem to tend to ring him up when they have need of a terribly cold, snide, and undeniably evil moody asshole. Luckily for us, he took the job of protraying a tantrum-prone, cockney killer (killer-boss? boss of killers? it's not entirely clear what he actually does), who has a soft spot for children and edible, dessert-like towns.

McDonagh clearly shares that view. About Bruges, anyway. No matter how unlikable a character is, they seem to take on a sort of golden glow as soon as they set foot into town. Drug dealers, killers....everyone is a little more charming in Bruges. Unless, you're a fat American tourist, it seems. We can't catch a break.

*Inside joke with people who've seen the movie. Where my Brugies at??