In Bruges - Film of the Month

Wise-cracking, hyper-verbose criminals? Amped-up, gleefully bloody violence? I know what you're thinking – how very 1992. But let's try and forget the yammering talk-talk-bang-bang of Mr Tarantino for a moment. In Bruges really doesn't care that the offbeat crime caper thing has been done before; it's too busy careering hell-for-leather across the screen in a shaggy, volatile, pound-together pulp of a film, barely pausing for breath between scabrous tough-guy zingers. The feature debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, there's clearly a dramatist's ear for dialogue in the verbal acrobatics of the two sparring protagonists – hitmen on the lam, hiding out in picture-perfect, canal-veined Bruges, awaiting instructions after a job goes very wrong. It's a kind of zany Waiting for Godot with guns, hookers and a racist dwarf strung out on horse tranquilizers.

Not sold? Farrell is unexpectedly brilliant: all over-caffeinated twitches and frazzled nerves, turning in the second funniest performance of his career (after Oliver Stone's Alexander, quite possibly the single most idiotic cultural artifact mankind has yet produced). Bluff, ursine Gleeson adds a gentle gravitas to McDonagh's relentlessly obsidian humour, while Clemence Poesy drifts past the camera in dreamy slow-motion and gets drafted in for the requisite Hot Girl sub-plot. Absurdist escapades and cheerful invective fill things out nicely, and then – just when you'd got comfortable with the bickering, shambling momentum – an oily, cockney Ralph Fiennes arrives, blitzing his way through the third act with a gloriously unhinged turn as the crims' boss. The climactic carnage of the finale sucks the whole thing into a great vortex of sheer, joyous lunacy, with ricocheting one-liners, bloody slapstick and real pathos, in between all the running and swearing and shooting. Go forth and multiplex. [Laura Smith]