Playwright Martin McDonagh’s brilliant film debut In Bruges is a modern-day The Usual Suspects. Two hitmen are sent to a storybook town in Belgium to lie low. Mad-Eye Moody galumphs around cathedrals while Colin Farrell mopes.When did skinheads stop beating up 12-year-old Pakistanis and become such poofs?

The movie is larded with gratuitous racism — Farrell tells Brendan Gleeson he suspects their stay in Bruges (’broozh’) will tip more to culture than fun, like a ‘fat, retarded black girl on a seesaw.’ On a man he disarms: ‘When did skinheads stop beating up 12-year-old Pakistanis and become such poofs?’ On Peter Dinklage’s race war: ‘Which side will the 12-year-old Pakistanis be on?’ (Exasperated reply: ‘The blacks!’) Ralph Fiennes throws off an entire career of playing self-effacing Englishmen, as a Cockney gangster disappointed in his opponent: ‘Don’t come out all fahckin’ Gandy on me!’

Unlike David Mamet making a statement that this is the way of the hard world, McDonagh seems to delight in the transgressiveness of voicing nakedly racist sentimentes. The script says ‘Pakistanis’ rather than ‘Pakis,’ if I remember correctly, and ‘blacks’ rather than ‘n-,’ and McDonagh pens moments of retribution. He comes across more like a grade school boy taking joy in mouthing dirty words rather than Mamet’s undisguised poison.

McDonagh works in a few sledgehammer-subtle Hieronymus Bosch references, but constructs the plot with watchmaker care. It’s got some of Harold Pinter’s verbal aggression, never best than in a captivating scene between Brendan Gleeson and Fiennes over the telephone. But like great novelists, McDonagh is more interested in how highly unlikely situations could have come to be. I never thought it possible to make midget jokes integral to the plot, yet every detail turns out significant. Things which seemed gimmicks turn out to have been the only way the showdown could have been put together. Big, big smile in the end.

Part of the plot revolves around hollowpoint bullets dating to the brutality of the British in India:

Originally, dum-dum referred to a new type of ammunition produced in the early 1890s at the arsenal in Dum Dum near Calcutta India…. it was soon noticed that such small caliber rounds were less effective at wounding or killing an enemy than the older large caliber soft lead bullets. Within the British Indian Army, the Dum Dum arsenal produced its now infamous solution - the jacketing was removed from the nose of the bullet… the hollow point design… expanded to a significantly larger diameter, producing larger diameter wounds… [Link]

Critics seem intent on anointing Farrell a Real Actor Now, and his conflicted hitman in Bruges was déjà vu after his conflicted hitman in Cassandra’s Dream. But he’s a more emotive version of Stifler with an air of desperation around his man-children. He never seems to be acting so much as trying to convince us of it.

The NYT:

The writing sounds like the handiwork of a very clever young filmmaking student with a fondness for Sartre and Tarantino… Despite the guns, genre posturing and self-consciously naughty shocks (jokes about racist dwarfs and fat Americans) it’s also unmistakably sincere. [Link]

A.Lane:

… the two men stop before a Hieronymus Bosch, his Last Judgment, marvelling at its torments: tiny figures being drowned and spiked and winkled out of shells with a knife…

In Bruges barges and blusters its way through dwarf jokes, child-abuse jokes, jokes about fat black women, and moldy old jokes about Americans, it runs the risk of pleasing itself more than its paying viewers. McDonagh is a garlanded playwright, famed for The Pillowman and The Beauty Queen of Leenane… If your verbal facility streams along like McDonagh’s, it must be almost impossible to check the rush… [Link]

McDonagh, the Irish Gordon Sumner:

Here’s the trailer: