In Bruges 4K 2008 Ultra HD 2160p

Two hit men fail their assignment in London and are sent to Bruges to sit it out until things settle down. There they have all sorts of fun - one takes the opportunity to sightsee, the other fights with tourists, wrestles a local young lady from her skunk-head boyfriend, and has fun with an American midget who is shooting a surrealistic movie in Bruges. And then they find out that the boss has ordered one of the guys to finish off the other. The warden, though, realizes that any serious business will have to be done by himself, especially since the killers seem to have gotten together.

In Bruges 4K Review
Two Irishmen find themselves in Bruges and are forced to share a room - all the hotels are full at Christmas. Humiliating for any pair of heterosexual men, even more so for a pair of hit men. But orders are orders, the boss sent them on vacation - to lay low and sit back after they made a very big mess of the last case.

The older one (Brendan Gleeson) is rankly sightseeing. The younger one (Colin Farrell) howls with boredom until he meets a midget art-house director and his beautiful assistant, whom he immediately starts courting. Then, though, the boss (Fiennes) instructs the older hitman to kill the younger one, and when he refuses, he sacrifices his Christmas vacation and goes to sort it out.

Funny, isn't it? The synopsis, the poster, even the trailer for In Bruges (2008) look like they were made for a Tarantino- and Guy Ritchie-inspired comedy. But don't believe your eyes, it's a different kind of movie. Martin McDonough, a young Irish playwright and director, made his feature film debut with this story (having won an Oscar a few years ago for his short film with Brendan Gleeson). He actually writes plays from contemporary life, makes the characters speak in lively, juicy language with local accents, and is known as a comediographer, wicked and observant. This, in general, is noticeable: we haven't been shown such killers before.

The killers are the usual English (well, okay, Irish, not as much difference as they'd like) gopniks. Go on vacation to a cheap Tunisian or Cypriot hotel, and you'll find them there: six beers in a row, a pack and a half of cigarettes a day, red burnt (in our case - bluish and frozen skin) and bruised knuckles on their hands - these people love to fight. The characters in the film are also very ordinary guys, they might as well have been working as sales representatives or workers in a fish factory. They, however, speak almost exclusively in foul language, averaging one "fark" per minute. Well, that's what they all say on vacation, isn't it? Here's another funny joke: one of the killers declares at one point that he loves his job. Why? Going around the world, meeting interesting people and taking them all down, almost like Stanley Kubrick.

The older one is smarter and a bit more settled, and sometimes (especially when there is nothing else to do but go to beautiful Gothic churches) he thinks about God and the afterlife, but just lazily. PR people or telephone salesmen probably realize they're going to hell, too, but they don't have to quit their jobs because of it.

Things change when the youngest finds the love of his life, and the oldest begins to have paternal feelings for the youngest. Gopniks' eyes are opened and for the next twenty-four hours or so they live a real life, with passions and self-sacrifice. And if it used to seem like a comedy about hit men who accidentally kill their own informant and have to clean his brains out of the backseat was the height of savagery, that's not true.

It turns out that a tall tragedy about morality and suffering, love and self-sacrifice on the example of two hired guns and one stiff is something much stranger, though not as fascinating.