In Bruges: Critic Reviews

In Bruges lurches from pretty but uninformative tour-of-the-town footage to static conversations between Ray and Ken, dully framed.

In In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Martin McDonagh's modest bag of tricks.

Farrell has brought his A-game to this cracking little comedy-noir written and directed by Martin McDonagh. He is absolutely superb.

It is easily one of the best debut feature films in recent memory. The notion of a pair of hit men cooling their heels as they're forced to play tourist in a picture-postcard town is clever enough. But as the story unspools, it grows more intriguing.

What's a pair of Irish hitmen doing In Bruges? I.e., what are two colorful but hackneyed movie stereotypes doing in Belgium's most well-preserved medieval city?

There are good moments laced through the severely uneven In Bruges, but the best reason for seeing it is Bruges itself.

'After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames' -- so begins In Bruges, an insanely clever thug's tale so rife with obscenity that those 11 words form one of the longest complete sentences that can be repeated safely here.

A brutal and at times amusing excursion.

It's obvious why [director] McDonagh wanted to launch his film career with bang-bang instead of talk-talk. But his timing seems off.

No one wants a movie that tiptoes in step with political correctness, yet the willful opposite can be equally noxious.

This film debut by the theater writer and director Martin McDonagh is an endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy, with a plot that cannot be foreseen but only relished.

After playing one too many sullen poseurs it's clear Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes had a ball making an inky black comedy seething with grandiose invective.

The movie gradually deepens from odd-couple comedy into Catholic-themed drama, but it remains marvelously funny throughout.

In the end, In Bruges is a bit arch and artificial, but it is more than redeemed by Farrell and Gleeson's presence, and by the bushwhacking wit of the film's writer/director.

If you could hoist a film on your shoulders and parade it through the theater for adulation and hoorays, the new British crime comedy In Bruges would be the one.

It's hard to mix dark wit with real tragedy, but that's what writer-director Martin McDonagh pulls off with In Bruges, a wonderfully realized examination of unintended and deadly consequences.

The dialogue is front and center, in spite of the picturesque setting and all the goings-on, and it's the best thing about the film.

A gruesome, confused stumblebum of a movie.

Not entertainment for the faint-hearted and mindlessly censorious, and in this particularly chaotic period, it seems right in tune with the times. It goes almost without saying that the acting of the three leads is, in a word, splendid.

This half-comic, half-serious account of two Irish hitmen who are sent to the titular Belgian burg to cool their heels after a job is moderately fair as a nutty character study, but overly far-fetched once the action kicks in.

Disappointingly strip-mines the very fatigued comic hit-man genre to diminishing returns.

This dark comedy shifts effortlessly between silly and sobering, and it finally gives Colin Farrell the chance to be as funny as we've long suspected he could be.

A rude and riotous laugher.

It feels contrived -- often clever and sometimes funny but always self-conscious, one of those indie flicks where the damn quirkiness is plastered on and right in your face. It's like an architect making the gargoyles the centrepiece of his church.

It's definitely not to everyone's taste, but the most interesting pictures never are.