But what’s most remarkable is how McDonagh holds onto his insolence while moving the film into deeper places. As the guns come out and the violence escalates, so does the sorrow in Farrell’s childlike if quick-trigger Ray, whose attitude toward the taking of life is anything but professional. And the preserved picture-book city seems to inspire in the guidebook-wielding Ken a grim courage he didn’t know he had. Once Fiennes’s family-man gangster shows up in the bustling, darkening square of the much-abused Flemish town, things get bloody indeed. But In Bruges, with its blunt, black wit running up against its moral fiber, manages to have its violent-crime-comedy cake and transcend it too.
