It was Joel Schumacher’s Tiger-land, in 2000, that first made a movie star of the Irish actor Colin Farrell. Al Pacino is reputed to have called him “the best actor of his generation”. But success didn’t go to Farrell’s head, it went to his groin, and his reputation as the new bad boy on the Hollywood block quickly overshadowed his renown as an actor. A series of bad films, including Alexander and Miami Vice, didn’t help. Now it’s being said that Farrell, at 32, has made a come-back in In Bruges.

This is the darkly comic story of two hit men, Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), who, after a botched job, have been ordered by their boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), to lie low in Bruges and await further orders. The setting is an inspired choice by the writer and director, Martin McDonagh, here making his feature-length debut.

Instead of the urban jungle of anonymous modern cities, here we have two killers trapped in the chocolate-box beauty of a medieval town.

For Ken, this is a welcome treat; travel broadens his soul. For the restless Ray, it’s hell on earth. The film begins with a comic clash between the fatherlike Ken dragging his stroppy and bored surrogate son Ray into churches and down cobbled streets.

Just as he botched his hit, so Ray starts to bungle his orders to stay out of sight and out of trouble. He gets into fights with fat American tourists, slugs a couple at a restaurant, meets a sexy drug dealer called Chloë (Clémence Poésy), beats up a local villain and ends up spending a coke-fuelled night with three hookers and a racist dwarf. Bruges, boring? As the film progresses we see the darker side of this fairy-tale city and the lighter, more humane side of our hit men.

McDonagh’s film is a gangster comedy with a tragic backbone, in which the violence is in the gags as much as in the guns. Ray has the big-mouth innocence of a child coupled with the screw-you indifference of a killer, and much of the comedy comes from his bravura displays of bad taste. Gays, suicidal dwarfs and child killers: nothing is out of bounds. It’s the exuberant gutter-talk of his characters that shows McDonagh at his best. But he hasn’t found a visual language to tell his story, and at times he becomes trite, as when using a shot of a Hieronymus Bosch painting to depict the hell Ray is going through. It’s as corny as a Klimt painting in a drama set in Vienna.

Ray’s inner hell comes from his accidental killing of a small boy during the assassination of a priest. This central plot point is based on the hoary old notion that villains have a code of honour that states that it’s out of order to kill kiddies. Unfortunately, the film carries this to absurd lengths in the final scene. This gives In Bruges the chance to explore such themes as sin, guilt and redemption – mandatory territory for Irish lapsed Catholic playwrights such as McDonagh. (Funny, no lapsed Catholic is ever so lapsed that he can’t resist a bit of sin and guilt when it suits his dramatic needs. It’s too easy a way to give a drama some instant depth.)

In Bruges ultimately rests on the performances of the two leads. This is the first time we have seen Farrell in a likeable role for a long time. It allows him to use his boyish charm, and he wins us over. But it’s a flawed performance, full of exaggerated facial expressions. If he raised his eyebrows any higher, they’d bump into a nearby hanging gargoyle. It’s Gleeson who gives the quiet, outstanding performance. He is so relaxed, so natural in front of a camera that we are never reminded we are watching an actor at work.

I liked the way the film starts off going nowhere, happy to be a drama rooted in character and dialogue instead of standard gangster fare. But McDonagh feels he owes his audience some action, and so in the final third of the film the plot goes into hit-man overdrive – on come the silencers and out pours the blood. Tragedy turns to farce, and there’s a whole chase-and-shoot finale that neatly ties the plot into one big body bag. What a shame that we start off in Bruges and end up back in Hollywood.

18, 106 mins

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