In Bruges

Watching the trailer for In Bruges for the first time a few months ago, I was taken back to the halcyon days of the mid-nineties, when every independent filmmaker with a Panaflex and a squib pack was ripping off Quentin Tarantino. It was a time when cinemas and video shelves where chock-a-block with films featuring wise-cracking criminals killing each other to ironically counterpointed pop songs. At the time, I was in my early teens, and like a lot of knuckle-headed violence junkies at that time, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were my cinematic lodestars, so even though these knockoffs were almost universally terrible, I made it my mission to watch them all. These films tended to have ridiculously long titles, like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (Kiefer Sutherland's only trip behind the camera) and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. These films aped Tarantino's irony-soaked affect and casual violence while failing to reproduce his wit or visual ingenuity. Watching these films was punishing, but in the long run, it was good for me and for the independent film business. It was such overkill that the audience and filmmakers got sick of the whole quip-spewing hitman genre. Of course, it helped that Quentin Tarantino himself went into Stanley Kubrick's one-movie-every-five-years semi seclusion.

When I actually sat down to watch In Bruges, though, the mid-nineties Quentin rip offs were the last thing on my mind. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright whose short film Six Shooter won an Oscar in 2006, has crafted an antidote to the breezy, cynical treatment of violence that the Tarantino era helped usher in to cinema. Yes, the film is about garralous, funny hitmen, but its approach toward the bruising reality of violence is serious and powerful. McDongagh is sort of the anti-Tarantino: the gangsters in his film don't kill people with a quip and a fast food reference. They have blood on their hands and they can't get it off.

That isn't to say that In Bruges isn't funny: it's often hilarious. Colin Farrell plays a rookie killer hiding out with partner Brendad Gleeson in the eponymous medieval Belgian town after a botched assassination in London. The first reel of the film largely consists of Ferrell chaffing against the constraints of his provincal setting in amusing fashion; he plays the cocky, Tarantino-style smart-arse with convincing aplomb. As the film progresses, Farrell's character begins to deepen as the truth about his London screw up is revealed and guilt begins to gnaw away at his soul. Within a single scene, Farrell swings from charming rogue to angst-wracked basket case. As Farrell slowly loses it amidst the gothic carnivalesque of Bruges, it dawned on me that this was a different type of hitman comedy: one about the psychic toll of violence. The film's power also comes from richly-detailed characters and the nearly surreal setting. All of those spires and flying buttresses and crenellated towers harken back to a pre-modern time in which sin and its repercussions permeated the European worldview. It's a fitting environment for a guilt-plagued killer to come to terms with his actions, his character, and his capacity for change.

Score: 8.0