In Bruges - Hitman comedy opens Sundance in style
Preview by Jack Foley
A NEW hitman comedy starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, has opened the 2008 Sundance Film Festival to mostly positive reviews.
Directed by Martin McDonagh, an award-winning playwright and Academy Award winner for his short Six Shooter, makes his feature debut with In Bruges, a black comedy that is said to put a different spin on a well-worked genre.
The film takes place in the preserved medieval Flemish town of Bruges, where two hit men, Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Gleeson), have been ordered to lie low among holiday tourists after a botched execution in London.
Though he feels out of place amid the Gothic architecture, canals, and cobbled streets, Ken is drawn to the serenity of the place as he tries to soothe Ray’s haunted psyche.
But as they wait for their boss Harry’s (Ralph Fiennes’s) call, they are caught up in a series of weird encounters with locals, tourists, a dwarf American filmmaker and Dutch prostitutes, as well as a romantic liaison that’s not what it seems.
When the call finally comes, it prompts a life-and-death struggle that is violent, darkly comic and surprisingly touching.
The Sundance website itself says of the film: “Galvanized by perceptive performances and framed by a unique beauty, this is filmmaking at its most exhilarating.”
While the Hollywood Reporter felt that while “generous bloodletting might prove too much for the indie crowd”, and the “artful conceit probably won’t play in the multiplex”, it still offers “an audacious combination of Old World grace and modern ultraviolence”.
What’s more, it’s “chock full of wonderful lines delivered by a splendid cast…” and “toys with the conventions and mostly transcends the limitations”.
Comingsoon.net, meanwhile, wrote: “If In Bruges doesn’t end up being the funniest and most quotable movies of the year, then it should be very close.”
The film opened a Sundance Film Festival that has so far been alive with big movie stars, including Tom Hanks (for The Great Buck Howard) and Robert De Niro (for What Just Happened?).