In Bruges (2008)
Why are hitmen so funny? I suppose the type of person one perceives that would have to do the job is made hilarious when you think that average people are more than capable of doing the job. With a gun, it's as easy as pushing a button and seeing a man fall. What that does to someone is a whole other ball of blood, though.
Ken (Gleeson) and Ray (Farrell) are hitmen that have been sent to Bruges after Ray fucked up a murder of a preist and accidentally also shot a kid. Ken enjoys the architecture and history of the city, while Ray hates all that and just wants to have sex with a drug dealer and talk to the little person she's selling drugs to until he can go back home. Except, in more ways than one, Ray knows what he has done will make it so he can never go back home.
Dark humor and tourism are at the meat of this story. Some would say the grappling of the human soul against its darker impulses, but that's more the bones. The structure of goth ennui pervades the movie before it takes off its shoes and watches movies where little people get thrown around like dolls. Drugs, sex, fat American tourists, English colonialism and decorum, all are laid bare as the silliest things in the world while a man waits to see if he is going to die.
The absurdity of the job of a hitman is also on display. "Do I look like I shoot children?" Ray asks the drug dealer on their date. We know he did, yet he plays it off as a joke to see how she judges him. Does babyfaced Ray look like he kills children because he did and he wants to know if that evil act is apparent to those who are inspecting him?
Those perceptions fill the movie, and it revels in the contradictions. Their boss (Fiennes) is a foul mouthed murderer, but he has total belief in his ideas about who and who should not be killed. The little person rails about how he is seen as an other yet goes on racist rants while high on various drugs. Friends prepare to kill each other for the ideals and justice they do not believe exist in the world.
The movie feels like it is being made up on the fly for most of the run time. People go off on odd tangents, chaos descends from almost nothing as conversations become violent, and plot points are dropped from almost nowhere. Yet then everything comes back. The tangents manifest in the theme of violence and loss, the chaos rolls back around to keep our characters on paths of conflict with one another, and the plot points from nowhere are traced back to definable points.
All three leads give damn solid performances. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are wonderful to watch against one another as Ray and Ken while Ralph Fiennes just kills it as their boss, Harry. I could just name everyone in the cast, but I'll let you go through the cast list on your own. All of them are amazing.
Check it out.