In Bruges

There are no mysteries more inscrutable to me than the success of Martin McDonagh. An Irish playwright living in London, he had his first big hit a decade ago with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which left me unimpressed. There followed several plays that I found downright offensive. McDonagh has a formula: as much violence and blood as possible (or more) interspersed with facile humor. In other words, carnage plus giggles, which, in combination, I find especially distasteful.

Add to this that a good many of his characters are stupid and that the plots teem with improbabilities, if not downright impossibilities, something that does not seem to occur to viewers, who, instead, swallow them whole.

McDonagh turned to the screen as well with an Oscar-winning short, Six Shooter, that I missed, and now to his first feature, In Bruges, which we are urged to mispronounce as Broozh. It lives up (or down) full throttle to his theatrical excesses (or lacks). As usual, though, he benefits from good acting and, as it emerges, his own competent direction. Bruges, moreover, is a terrific setting, being Belgium's best preserved medieval city, the subject also of Georges Rodenbach's novel Bruges la morte, on which Korngold based his popular opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City).

The first improbability is that Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), two hired murderers employed by Harry (Ralph Fiennes), are sent by him into hiding in Bruges after the (unexplained) murder of a priest, during which a young acolyte was also accidentally killed by Ray. (Why must Ken also hide?) It seems that professional murderers who kill in cold blood are frazzled and forever haunted by the murder of a child, if not indeed driven to suicide, as we see in the case of another murderer who kills a dwarf whom he improbably mistakes for a child.

[IMG:R]Ken, a bear of a man, enjoys the medieval beauties of Bruges, which Ray, a lady killer, repeatedly describes as a shithole. As customary with McDonagh, "fuck" and "fucking" proliferate from Ken and Ray, though, for a cheap laugh, Ray disapproves of it coming from Harry. By an unlikely mistake, only one room is available at a hostelry for Ray and Ken, although two had been ordered; it is tourist-swamped Christmastime and no other rooms are available anywhere, which bothers Ray because he seems to assume that Ken is gay. The hotel is run by the pregnant Marie, who alone seems to notice something askew with our boys.

Ray is unimpressed with the city until he comes across a film being shot with an American dwarf, Jimmy, in it, whom he insists calling a midget. Ray also comes across pretty Chloe, whom he tries crassly to pick up, and who, after the briefest resistance, falls hard for him. Sweet as she is, she is involved in drug trading, as is her ex-boyfriend, known only as the Canadian Guy, who improbably drops in on her and Ray in flagrante.

Bruges, which Harry hasn't visited since childhood, nevertheless is home to a sinister associate of his, Yuri, who will provide Ken with a gun for an unlikely murder he is to commit. While I don't want to give away too much, consider the following:

Someone gets arrested on a train from Bruges on which those after him couldn't have dreamed he would be. Someone goes to his foretold death carrying a hidden gun even though he refuses to use it in self-defense. Someone shot in the leg and in the throat, and bleeding profusely, jumps from a great height to the pavement, but can still warn someone else about imminent danger before expiring. There are savage, fairly indiscriminate beatings, one partial blinding and enough blood for an abattoir. Ray beats up a man and his female date in a populous restaurant for the slightest reason, then walks out without the least interference.

There are also cute digressions, such as the dwarf holding forth at considerable length about the coming universal war between blacks and whites, including black dwarves and white ones, and duly gets a vicious karate chop from someone not a dwarf. You have to see In Bruges to believe it—or, rather, to disbelieve it, if a bit of logic is among your requirements.

The cinematography is fine and Bruges, of course, looks good; you may even like Carter Burwell's artsy-fartsy score. Near the end, you get—unaccountably and out of nowhere—some carnival grotesques, and there is a dishonest conclusion that can be interpreted in totally contradictory ways.

The acting is solid from the three leads down, though I found the leading lady, Clèmence Poèsy (unlikely name!), less attractive than the pregnant Marie (Thekla Reuten) in a film steadily pregnant with impossibilities.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.