Martin McDonagh took to film like a Belgian to chocolate with this, his debut feature film. A black comedy starring Colin Farrel as Ray and Brandon Gleeson as Ken, two hitmen who've been told to lay low in the boring and bit of a shithole/beautiful and quaint (depending which one you ask) town of Bruges as they await further orders from their boss Harry (Raplh Fiennes). As is the case with all black comedies, things don't exactly go as planned and a bit of bloody chaos comes to the quiet town in the shape of guns, drugs and a dwarf starring in quite strange film.
Taking a wealth of experience from writing plays for the stage, McDonagh knows his way around writing a script. In Bruges jumps flawlessly from the hilariously ridiculous to the sombre and depressing without missing a beat inbetween. Most of the laughs come from the dialogue between the three criminals as they seem to be operating in a world completely divorced from the town that they're actually in. Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes play off each other incredibly well, particularly in one scene with a stalemate in a stairwell culminating in one of the strangest conversations that'll ever be had in the middle of a shootout.
Put simply, if you enjoy your humour a bit darker you'll love In Bruges. If you're not one for jokes revolving around people who've lost their heads or the ethics of killing innocent children (albeit by accident) you might wanna give it a miss.
Also worth noting is that McDonagh's second film Seven Psychopaths (apparently much in the same vein as In Bruges) is out pretty soon and look just as weird and wonderful.
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