#337: In Bruges
Release Date: February 8th, 2008
Format: DVD
Written by: Martin McDonagh
Directed by: Martin McDonagh
2 Stars
In Bruges is an unforgettable movie, with one of the most audacious scripts I can remember.
It’s also shit. I didn’t like it at all.
It’s the second film I’ve seen from Irish writer/director Martin McDonagh, the first being his Academy Award-winning 2017 drama, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which might be the worst film I’ve ever seen in a theater on its initial run. I hated that movie. Maybe the Mike Myers-vehicle The Love Guru was worse, but it’s close.
McDonagh is a filmmaker that writes his movies until they spill off the page in glugs and globs. He seems to think, why write scripts for different movies when I can put all of my ideas into one?
If I were McDonagh, I would have taken his idea for In Bruges and broken it up into a trilogy:.
Movie #1: Two Irish hitmen, middle-aged Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and his younger partner-in-crime Ray (Colin Ferrell), lie low in Bruges, Belgium after their latest killing. The older Ken enjoys the history and ancient cathedrals of the quiet city, while Ray finds it a bore. As the film progresses we learn that Ray accidentally killed a young boy with a stray bullet during their last hit job. He’s suffering from a guilty conscience, amplified by the city’s quietude and religious iconography.
Movie #2: A young Belgian woman, Chloë (Clémence Poésy), is looking to turn her life around. She’s in a relationship with a man she doesn’t love, a drug dealer named Eirik (Jérémie Renier), and supports herself by working as a production assistant and selling cocaine to the actors on set. One day she meets cute with Ray and falls in love. Despite his job as a hitman, she chooses to risk her life to be with him.
Movie #3: A crime boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), orders Ken to kill Ray. Harry can’t condone Ray’s killing of a child, even if it was an accident, and when Ken refuses to carry out the hit out of loyalty, Harry is forced to travel to Bruges to kill both men himself.
Doesn’t that sound like a great trilogy? Obviously McDonagh is a talented storyteller, a furnace of plot devices and interesting characters. My problem is that he throws way too many ideas into one script and brazenly believes they’ll cohere. They don’t. It’s a big pulpy mess.
I haven’t even mentioned his wild tonal shifts and minor plot asides. In Bruges is not some serious morality play. It’s downright silly at times. For example, there’s a drug-addicted dwarf character named Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who acts as foil to Ray. Ray seems obsessed with befriending Jimmy simply because he’s a little person, and when he’s rebuffed at a cocaine-fueled party, Ray punches Jimmy in the face. Before that, for some reason, Jimmy goes on an extended rant about his belief that the world is soon destined for a global race war. Ray wants to know if the Vietnamese will fight for the whites or the blacks.
McDonagh writes the scene for laughs, but it’s like he’s unaware of the scene’s relationship with the rest of his script, a movie that wants us to take seriously the accidental killing of an innocent child. His story also features two gruesome suicides and sober discussions regarding life and death, heaven and hell.
He’s an audacious writer, I’ll give him that. See In Bruges to believe it, if not to like it.
