In Bruges

[angelophile]

Every now and then I pick up movies that I have heard good reports on but have no real clue about. Sometimes they disappoint, other times they surprise and please. In Bruges is another movie, like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which I've fallen in love with on first viewing.

It's rare that anyone's going to be able to use "Colin Farrell" and "sublime" in the same sentence, but that's what Farrell is in this movie. He's quite simply, utterly superb as Irish hitman Ray who, along with Brendan Gleeson as Ken, is sent to lie low in the Belgium town of Bruges and await the attention of their foul-mouthed boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes).

Like Sexy Beast before it, the movie walks a tightrope between shocking drama and black comedy and does so brilliantly. Some lines and setups are deliciously blackly funny, such as Jordan Prentice's racist midget, while on the other end of the spectrum there's genuine pathos and heartbreak.

Farrell's performance is central to the film - not the brightest bulb in the box, Ray is by parts moody and funny, lethal and sometimes heartbreakingly sad and vulnerable like a little boy. It's a genuine career high for Farrell. It's the chemistry he has with Brendan Gleeson as the smarter, near father-figure as the pair of misplaced hitmen wander around the medieval architecture, or are stuck in a single bedroom in a chintzy B&B, Farrell stupefied and exasperated beyond endurance by Bruge and considering it some kind of purgatory.

And those almost farcical elements - as the frustrated Ray gets into repeated sticky situations with American tourists - are counterbalanced by the far bleaker tone that creeps in as the real reason for the hitmen being where they are is revealed and Ralph Fiennes, apparently channeling Ben Kingsley's turn in Sexy Beast, turns up. Along the way there's time for a romantic interest in the form of Clémence Poésy and some drug fueled strangeness with Jordan Prentice before things suddenly get deadly, and tragically, serious.

By turns mournful, surreal, tragic, hilarious and macabre, writer director and previous Oscar winner Martin McDonagh's script is a genuine masterpiece.

It's rare to stumble across a movie of this quality and rarer still to see it bearing the words "starring Colin Farrell."

But this is a real gem and goes straight on my list of "Movies I Love About Hitmen", along with Leon, Grosse Pointe Blank and The Matador. And starts a new category - "Movies About Belgium I Love".