Our Heroine Demands Truth in the Advertising of Ralph Fiennes!

I saw the movie In Bruges this weekend. GAW! What a terrible movie. A virtual perfect storm of things I hate to have paid good money to see. Let's see if I can enumerate the various ways in which this movie appalled me, in no particular order.

1) Complete dishonesty in advertising? Check.
The entire trailer was culled from the last 10 minutes of the movie, which leads one to believe that the movie consists of a suited Ralph Fiennes running through the streets of Bruges. As a girl I think that movie would be awesome. We all like Ralph Fiennes, right? He's so proper! He's so handsome! He's British! He's also fierce! I would have really liked that movie.

This was not that movie.

In this movie, the last 10 minutes would be the ONLY 10 minutes in which Fiennes appears on film, and the only 10 minutes in which anyone runs anywhere. The rest of the time, two annoying, generic hitmen (neither of whom are Ralph Fiennes) jaw at eachother about...life.

2) Completely amoral "anti-heroes" who are supposed to be likable and cool but who are actually utterly repellent in every particular? Check.
The leads are assassins, people. The fact that one likes castles and the other one, midgets, does not make them "quirky" and/or "charming."

3) Anti-American jokes that serve no purpose other than the director's ideology and to show his pseudo-intellectual European friends he is perfectly in tune with "right think?" Oh, definitely check.
In my humble opinion, if you want to make jokes about fat, loud, crass Americans and have it sting a bit, perhaps the people making the jokes shouldn't be child-killing assassins.

4) Cheap one-night stand with a drug-dealer, which ostensibly becomes "True Love^TM"? Check, indeed.
If a killer and a pusher who spend one day lying to and manipulating eachother, then shag, are what qualify as great lovers these days, then we have truly emptied the concept of love of all meaning.

So, that's it. I just really, really hated the movie. I turned to my friend at one point to roll my eyes over how heinous the whole thing was, but he was asleep. GAW! Yet further evidence that the movie was not only appalling, it was boring.

One final note on the plot. Sane people do not consider shagging a drug pusher an act of redemption appropriate to a parking-ticket, let alone child-murder. Turning yourself in to face the consequences? Yes, maybe. Drug-addled sex, followed by an assault charge? Not even close.