The Bruges Tourist Board should sue Universal Pictures for this movie. Rarely has a movie been so cruel to its filming location.
But there is more to “In Bruges,” the recent film featuring Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes, than just making fun of its startling beautiful and much-maligned Belgian setting.
“In Bruges” is a surprisingly funny and touching action movie that never really lulls. Although the action doesn’t pick up until the very end, which is a surprise if you saw the slightly misleading trailer, the rest of the movie is a charming and at times tender comedy.
The movie tells the story of two hitmen who botch an assassination and are sent to the picturesque medieval town of Bruges, Belgium, to hide out until it is safe for them to return to London.
Colin Farrell, who plays one of the hitmen, marks his best performance in years. That’s not a tough statement to make, considering his recent work has consisted of such fantastic films as “Miami Vice,” “Alexander” and “S.W.A.T.” But it is nevertheless impressive to see how talented he really is. In a scene where Farrell recounts a tragic moment in his past, he physically shakes as he sobs; it’s a moving moment.
And Fiennes is his usual terrifying self. He may have a side career as a leading man in romantic comedies like “Maid in Manhattan,” but his true calling is playing an unhinged villain, and he plays it as perfectly here as he does in the Harry Potter films, though perhaps with a bit more humor.
And that is the great thing about the film. It is surprisingly funny. A movie about two hitmen fleeing the country for a murder they committed doesn’t seem to lend itself easily to comedy, but most of the film plays more as a comedy than anything else.
The movie, written by English-born, Academy Award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh, is full of jokes about Americans, dwarfs and prostitutes, but it never feels crude like a Farrelly brothers film. Most of these jokes are made by Farrell, and the viewer is invited to find him crude and uneducated.
The main recurring joke of the film, and it is a film with plenty of recurrences, is that Farrell cannot imagine any place worse than Bruges. This, despite the fact that the city is filmed so lushly and beautifully that one can’t imagine not wanting to go.
But there is a sense of melancholy in the way the city is filmed. The other hit man, played by a fatherly and lovable Brendan Gleeson, aka Mad-Eye Moody from the Harry Potter films, mentions that the city felt more like a dream than reality when they first arrived. And in the pivotal moments of the film it really does.
The city is playing host to a film crew shooting a movie with a dream sequence inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of “The Last Judgment,” which depicts the nightmarish fantasy of how the last judgment of men in the Bible would appear. The climactic battle scene takes place in this film set throughout the streets of the city, and it is a bizarre treat to see these fantastical characters surround and confuse these shooting mobsters.
The film is carefully crafted, surprisingly funny and genuinely moving. It’s definitely worth seeing.
[email protected]