- Harry Potter reunion! Voldemort banishes Mad-Eye Moody to Bruges where his roommate meets Fleur Delacour, coke dealer, and they have a brief and tumultuous love affair.
- I never thought I’d be saying this, but Colin Farrell was a) really, really excellent in this, b) completely freaking hot, and c) worthy of knocking me up with ten thousand babies. Like, I’m not even kidding. Colin Farrell has never, ever appealed to me aside from the brief moment in The New World where he held a baby, and yet I loved everything about him in this. I feel compromised admitting this. Audrey said “It’s too bad, though, that I have no interest in seeing his back catalogue. I mean, Phone Booth?” No. If I was making a list of people who can act well, Colin Farrell would never have been on my radar. I am slowly changing my mind about him. Now, if only he could shed the whole “I’m probably carrying at least four different STDs and quite possibly have scabies and bronchitis” image, that would be good.
- The trailer makes this look like a comedic Guy Ritchie type movie, but it’s really not. It’s very funny in places, but it’s more drama than comedy, and the violence occurs in mostly isolated incidents. They mostly spend their time sightseeing in Bruges (hence the clever title of the film) and it’s more than a little melancholy. They spend a lot of time in galleries perusing 14th century Flemish art and having heavy discussions on purgatory and what that means for hitmen like themselves. Thus the Hieronymous Bosch painting in the trailer, although I don’t think the one in the trailer is the same one that’s in the movie.
- Speaking of the paintings, I really liked how they tied them into the film-within-a-film as Ray was lying bullet-ridden and near death in the middle of the road. Throughout the movie, the film-within-a-film is treated as something of a joke as it’s this preposterous and pretentious Dutch creation with dream sequences and midgets (dwarves!), but I loved how this parlayed into having characters from the paintings appearing in the streets and surround Ray. The real question for him is, of course, whether or not the people he’s seeing are from the heaven, hell, or purgatory panel of the triptych that appears earlier in the film. Where do hitmen like Ray end up, anyway?
- I really like Brendan Gleeson. And Ralph Fiennes, who doesn’t actually show up until halfway through the film.
- Did I mention Colin Farrell gets to wear glasses at one point? Because he does and it’s pretty hot.
- This movie might do lots for Brugge tourism because the city really does look quite pretty.
- I always associate centered, symmetrical shots of people from the back from the shoulders up with Rene Magritte, that other famous Belgian, and so I liked that there were a couple of shots like that in this film.
- There’s this hilarious part where Colin Farrell and Fleur Delacour are on a date at some restaurant and this belligerant neighbouring diner gets really, really angry that Fleur has been blowing her cigarette smoke all over them. Colin Farrell is all “ANGRY AMERICANS!!” and beats them up because there’s a running gag of “I’m American, please don’t hold that against me” throughout the film. Later the police finally track him down in order to arrest him for the restaurant assault, only he finds out that the belligerant asshat was Canadian, hahaha. It was pretty hilarious.
In Bruges
The last thing I expected was that I would come to adore Colin Farrell by the end of this.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Holed up in Bruges, Belgium after a difficult job, two hit men (Farrell and Gleeson) begin to differ on their views of life and death as they become used to local customs.
