Martin McDonagh’s feature debut opens with two hit men in a postcard. Ray and Ken, London-based Irish gunmen, are hiding in Bruges, Belgium, waiting on orders from their boss, Harry. Ken finds the city beautiful and relaxing. Ray is bored and hates it. That split is the engine of In Bruges, a 2008 crime comedy-drama that keeps threatening to become a travelogue and never does.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as Ray and Ken
Farrell plays Ray, the younger and more volatile of the two. Gleeson plays Ken, his mentor, who takes the canals and the architecture as they come. The film is set and was filmed in Bruges, and McDonagh uses the place as a waiting room rather than a backdrop. The men have time to think and to talk about their last assignment. Most of that talk is better than most of the plot.
The Priest and the Altar Boy
Ray’s first order went wrong. He shot a priest during confession and killed an altar boy standing in the line of fire. Harry’s response is the film’s moral spine: killing a child, even by accident, is unforgivable. So he sent Ray to Bruges to give him a good experience before he dies. Then he orders Ken to kill him.
That is a clean premise. The trouble is what McDonagh hangs on it.
Jimmy, Chloë and Eirik
Ray and Ken meet a dwarf actor named Jimmy, on location for a film shoot. Ray pursues Chloë, a local drug dealer working as a production assistant, and the two have dinner, where Ray punches a Canadian couple over smoking indoors. At her apartment, her ex-boyfriend Eirik arrives with a handgun. Ray disarms him and fires a blank in his face, blinding him in one eye. Ray then takes the gun, live rounds and Chloë’s drugs.
The cast fills these parts well:
- Colin Farrell as Ray
- Brendan Gleeson as Ken
- Ralph Fiennes as Harry
- Clémence Poésy as Chloë
- Jordan Prentice as Jimmy
- Jérémie Renier as Eirik
Fiennes arrives late as Harry and plays him as a man who has confused his own rules with decency. It works.
A Debut With an Award Behind It
In Bruges premiered as Sundance’s opening film on 17 January 2008. Focus Features gave it a limited US release on 8 February 2008; it opened in Ireland on 7 March 2008 and in the UK on 18 April 2008. It earned $34.5 million against a $15 million budget.
McDonagh was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and won the British Academy Film Award in the same category. Farrell won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. In 2021, the Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay the 40th-greatest of the 21st century.
Where the Film Slips
The screenplay is the reason to watch, and it is also the reason the film never quite closes. McDonagh writes long, looping confrontations that are funnier on the page than in the cut, and the middle stretch stalls the momentum the premise earned. The tonal swings are the point, but they are not free. A film that opens on a dead child and then asks you to laugh at a dwarf actor is making a bet. In Bruges wins that bet more often than it loses. It does not win it every time.
The Ending Ray Earns
Ken tracks Ray to a park, ready to follow Harry’s order. He finds Ray preparing to kill himself with Eirik’s loaded gun, distraught over the boy. Ken stops him, tells him about Harry’s order and tells him to leave Bruges. That is the film’s best move: the assassin who cannot do the job because the man he was sent to kill is already punishing himself. Farrell plays the guilt without begging for sympathy, and Gleeson plays the mercy without making it noble.
In Bruges is a debut that announces a writer with a voice and a director still learning how to hold one. The dialogue is sharp, the performances are better, and the film’s reputation has outgrown its shape.
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