In Bruges

Things I generally like include Irishmen, funny crime plots and characters, on location filming where the place becomes a secondary character, and Ralph Fiennes playing an evil bastard. He wears it well; he’s always disturbingly attractive when being a supreme psycho except when he’s Voldemort. I really liked this movie. It was funny yet had some very decent moments of poignancy, the usual dose of good acting from a British-Irish film (expect nothing less), and a very good script from first time feature director Martin McDonagh. Colin Farrell fit nicely in this flick. I’ve never found him particularly attractive and generally do not watch most of the films he’s in, but he can have pretty entertaining and decent turns in such things as Daredevil and Minority Report. He’s better when he keeps his accent, and sticks to comedy with appropriate amounts of drama. McDonagh is originally a playwright, and at certain points in the film, it does feel rather like a theatre play mostly in terms of characterizations and in the deep moments. One can definitely compare it to Layer Cake or Guy Ritchie films which are also British movies about criminals and feature violence, this one has a more sober note and setting yet still remains hilarious throughout. I look forward to McDonagh’s future films, and hopefully he works with Brendan Gleeson (already their second project), Fiennes, and Farrell again as he knows how to use them.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!