Movie Review: In Bruges

Considering the average person has and will never meet a hitman, filmmakers sure do love the assassin's trade as a subject for movies. From Point Blank to Nikita via Grosse Point Blank and, er, Hitman, we've had contract killers of all genders, races and ages.

Acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh's debut feature In Bruges is probably the first to be set in Belgium, a country better known for worryingly fruity beer, Poirot and Jean Claude Van Damme than a violent criminal underworld. The hitmen in this case are a pair of Irishmen played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who come to the quaint medieval town of the title to cool off after a hit back in London goes wrong.

You can tell that In Bruges was written and directed by a playwright, because the emphasis here is on talking rather than plot. In fact, very little really happens for the first hour, except for Farrell and Gleeson bantering around the town, with the odd break to fight a dwarf or steal some drugs.

Luckily, the dialogue is crisp and funny – alright, this kind of witty repartee only ever happens on the big screen, but it's a pleasure listening to the two actors make the most of McDonagh's charmingly profane script. And against the odds, Farrell delivers a genuinely great performance, and turns a murderous, bigoted slob into someone vaguely likable.

But for all the dazzling verbage, In Bruges is an odd mix of styles that doesn't entirely work. For a start you know something is slightly amiss when Ralph Fiennes pops up in your movie playing a foul-mouthed cockney mob boss – he's obviously a great actor, but a career spent playing upper-class tosspots means Bob Hoskins won't be losing too much sleep at night.

The mix of high-minded religious allegory and crude laughs never quite gels, and both a soppy romantic subplot and the inevitable climactic bloodbath take the movie into a more generic area that McDonagh has spent much of the film trying to avoid.

Nevertheless, McDonagh has overcome his biggest obstacle and made a movie that looks and feels cinematic, while maintaining enough individuality to make it stand out from the umpteen other hitman movies out there.