A string of Irish stage plays dating back to 1996 has turned Martin McDonagh into one of the most bankable young playwrights in the world. He has a dazzling way with words, and his mantelpiece is groaning with prizes. The irony is this: McDonagh doesn’t have a theatrical bone in his body. He is a film nut, and therein lies the huge and lucrative appeal of his plays. They have the pulse and energy of movies.

In Bruges is as comic and macabre as anything McDonagh has crafted for the stage, but his debut feature film is far from novel. There are shades of The Dumb Waiter, and alarming tints of Father Ted.

The ingredients are simple. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are chalk-and-cheese hitmen who hole up in the medieval Belgian town when a job goes wrong in London. Ralph Fiennes is a psychopathic marvel as their boss, who barks orders from Essex down the phone at awkward intervals. A need to terminate one of his henchmen is the poisonous tipping point of the film. The killer has to murder his friend or die.

Bruges: the complete guide

Gareth Scurlock's guide to the city and locations from the film starring Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes

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It’s morbid fun, but the chemistry is weak. Farrell’s shallow youth is crushed by the parochial tweeness of Bruges. Gleeson revels in the culture, the galleries and the churches. They don’t grapple with life’s imponderables the way Tarantino’s dudes (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) did in Pulp Fiction.

McDonagh cleverly tortures his stars with secret demons, and Gleeson’s and Farrell’s performances are not short of pathos. But their characters occupy such different spaces – culturally, intellectually, emotionally and even sexually when Clémence Poésy’s impossibly saucy drug dealer pops up to give Farrell some rampant R&R – that they look preposterous when trying to engage on any credible level. What’s left is a sort of squidgy father-and-son bond.

That said, the incidental comedy is brilliant. The film is riddled with ridiculous twists, slapstick violence and barmy cameos. McDonagh has never knowingly let good taste interfere with a thoroughly offensive joke. Jordan Prentice’s American midget is mercilessly thrown about from one end of the film to the other. Lard-arsed Americans die of heart attacks. A prissy antismoking couple are knocked clean out. Homosexual skinheads are blinded. When all’s said and done, it’s a wonderfully absurd film. McDonagh is never stuck for a brilliant kiss-off line. I doubt he’ll ever be stuck for an audience either.

18, 107mins

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