Irish Echo Sport

Martin McDonagh’s first feature film – In Bruges – will premiere at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the Irish Echo has learned.

The movie, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, is described as a “brilliantly scripted, wise-cracking genre-bender with a surprisingly fibrous moral centre”.

Ray and Ken are two mismatched hit men, sent to lay low in the medieval Flemish town of Bruges after a botched execution. Ray (Farrell) is antsy and can’t stand the place, while Ken (Gleeson) finds the chocolate-box location a strangely soothing, nostalgia-inducing antidote.

While waiting for the call from their gangster boss (Ralph Fiennes in hilarious form), they become entangled in a series of bizarre and distracting local encounters.

McDonagh’s sleight-of-hand is audacious: on the surface this is a profane comedy, but underneath it surges with rawness and vulnerability, the sad story of an ageing criminal wanting to save his troubled sidekick from repeating his own mistakes.

In Bruges opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

We’re assured that connections of the film will attend the movie’s premiere which takes place on Saturday, June 14 at 6.30pm. Sadly, this clashes almost directly with the Ireland v Australia test match in Melbourne.

Watch the movie’s trailer here.