In Bruges

In Bruges

Directed by Martin McDonagh (R)

A pair of Irish hit men lay low in Belgium after one of their jobs goes terribly wrong.

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Comedies don’t come any darker than Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, said David Edelstein in New York. The Irish playwright tries his hand at filmmaking with an “audaciously violent” story about two “funny and lovable” hit men. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play two Irish assassins who botch a job. They’re then sent to Bruges, Belgium, to wait for further instructions from their boss (Ralph Fiennes). McDonagh has a knack for using humor to deepen horror and vice versa, as he’s shown in blistering plays such as The Pillowman. He attempts to inject a vein of darkness into In Bruges, but the “shifts in tone are hard, if not impossible, to reconcile.” The movie at first promises to be an odd-mob-couple comedy, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. McDonagh then takes the plot in a couple different directions, which at times proves “surprisingly affecting.” But as a budding writer-director, he seems torn between his two roles, said Ella Taylor in The Village Voice. In Bruges “succumbs to a self-defeating tonal clash between McDonagh the playwright, tipsy on wordplay and deep themes of sin, loyalty, and redemption,” and McDonagh the aspiring filmmaker, looking to make his mark and money in Hollywood.