In the language of this movie, "In Bruges is fuckin' useless." In the language of a sympathetic critic, it is difficult to make a movie about stupid and corrupt people without the film being dumb and amoral. In Bruges has tried to address both of these problems. Because the two hired killers and their boss are not the sharpest tools in the shed, the movie tries to create comedy to hold our interest. A tiny minority of viewers will like the black humour, but I did not. Part of the problem is that dumb dialogue is often not witty. For example, we have dialogue somewhat like this: "Guy 1: Bruges is a shithole! Guy 2: It's beautiful. Maybe you should wait til you see it. Guy 1: It's still a shit hole." Sometimes the humour attempts come from the sound track. As the hitman with some redeeming value pulls his bleeding body across an old stone floor to try to save someone, we hear tinkley, cheesy music to belittle his effort. Funny?
While the humour attempt fails, the other attempt works. The older of the two killers has a crisis of conscience and refuses to kill. Unfortunately, this does not happen until the first half of the movie has dragged on with no moral compass, no interesting characters, and no discernable plot. But when the older hitman refuses to kill, the movie becomes a drama of substance. Will he have the resove to hold fast to his decision? How will he deal with his raging boss?
But just when the drama starts to work, the attempts at black comedy again undermine everything. So when the crime boss and the younger hitman are set for a gun fight in a small Bruges hotel, their concern about harming a pregnant woman leads them to this deal: Count to 3, then the young guy will leap out of a second-storey window into the canal, and the boss will run out the front door and try to shoot him. Juvenile. Not funny. Insipid.