By manohla dargis

Published: February 8, 2008

Not long after the start of “In Bruges,” an amusing trifle from the potty-mouthed playwright Martin McDonagh, two hit men pause before a painting, awe and puzzlement and perhaps something else shading their faces. The painting — a 15th-century Netherlandish diptych — shows a prisoner wearing a loincloth and a strangely calm expression given that he’s being flayed alive. A small gathering of men (an audience, you might say) stands around the condemned, whose left calf is being peeled like a blood orange.

Mr. McDonagh has a thing for red. He splashes it around in his farcical play “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and does much the same for “In Bruges,” his feature filmmaking debut. Neither work offers much beyond the comedy of words and wounds, though there is sting in both. In “Inishmore” an I.R.A. enforcer says: “Come on in ahead for yourselves. I’m just in the middle of shooting me Dad.” The lines are funny kind of, sort of, precisely because of the apparent diffidence with which the enforcer (or, rather, Mr. McDonagh) joins two seemingly dissonant themes, in this case politeness and patricide. The enforcer tortures men in the name of terror, but (oh, irony!) he loves his cat.

The film’s hit men — an Irish Laurel and Hardy act called Ray and Ken and played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson — have come to the Belgian tourist town of Bruges on puzzling orders from their boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes). There, about an hour from Brussels and a greater psychological distance from their home in London, Ray and Ken wait and talk and wait and talk in a hotel room built for two. Ken reads books and coaxes Ray to enjoy the sights. Ray responds by scuffing his shoes on the ground like the child he’s meant to resemble, from his pretty pout to his comically expressive eyebrows, dark slashes that rise and fall and further accent the already heavily intonated dialogue. The camera drags along too.

Much of the pleasure of Mr. McDonagh’s dialogue comes from intonation and repetition. His characters tend to repeat their own and one another’s words, a device that forces you to heed both the musicality of the language and all that lies beneath those words — the oblique hopes, the implied fears, the unarticulated relationships. “We shall strike a balance between culture and fun,” says Ken, while coercing Ray to go sightseeing. “Somehow, I believe, Ken, the balance will tip in the favor of culture,” says Ray. Mr. Farrell’s voice rises up nearly to a falsetto on the word tip, which underscores the absurdity of the scene — two paid killers sightseeing in Bruges or anywhere — while adding an inescapable suggestion of menace.

Mr. Gleeson, Mr. Farrell and especially the late-arriving and welcome Mr. Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks. The three work well together, with Mr. Gleeson’s solid, stolid physicality and performance giving ballast to Mr. Farrell’s lilting, fluttery turn. It’s easy for Mr. Farrell to turn on heat; what’s hard for him as an actor is turning the temperature off, or at least down, as he does here — finding another way to connect to the material (and us) beyond the promise in his dark, fluttering lashes. His performance as Ray is as crudely conceived as it is finally sentimental (the same goes for the film), but it’s also winning because Mr. Farrell makes us see the goofy side of seduction.

“In Bruges” is itself a goof, both diverting and forgettable. Despite the guns, genre posturing and self-consciously naughty shocks (jokes about racist dwarfs and fat Americans) it’s also unmistakably sincere. The writing sounds like the handiwork of a very clever young filmmaking student with a fondness for Sartre and Tarantino, though here the 30-something Mr. McDonagh only name-drops Nicolas Roeg and “Touch of Evil.”These are solid allusions, certainly, yet like that 15th-century painting of the unfortunate prisoner being flayed alive — which suggests that Mr. McDonagh means to say something about the spectacle of violence — they don’t add up to anything. He talks a blue streak beautifully, but he has yet to find the nuance and poetry that make his red images signify with commensurate sizzle and pop.

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