In Bruges and the mass hysteria of bad taste

In Bruges is an awful film, not in the way Armageddon or Independence Day were awful, but subtly awful, like the way it goes when you see a beautiful woman from a long way off, but when you meet her she is a homeless man begging for money.
In other words, it’s not unwatchable; it’s even slightly alluring. But once it is over you feel a bit stupid for wasting all that time it took to realise the truth.

For all those stylish trailers and big names, it’s nothing more than a mix of worn-out genres set in your typical nobody’s-been-here-before-because-it’s-so-dull setting, the kindergarten irony of sightseeing (or any polite pursuit) and violence, and predictable and abrupt leaps from menace to quirk to sentimentality. In short, it is a half-dozen bad movies, all of them exceedingly obvious.
And when the dwarf appears dressed as a schoolboy, your worst fear is that the film will end in the clumsiest and most obvious way imaginable, and that fear is, though by the end you’d expect nothing less, confirmed.
Much has been said of the acting. While Brendan Gleeson could act his way out of a bad role while hurtling through the earth’s atmopshere, and Ralph Fiennes was refreshing, Colin Farrell alternated inexplicably between overacting and underacting, and between personalities as well — sometimes Lennie Small, sometimes Arthur Fonzarelli, but always excruciatingly sentimental.
I am overcriticising the film — it does not deserve this kind of unprovoked scrutiny; there are lots of awful films. And I even had a nice night – a hot dinner date with identical twins in Chinatown (Parnell St), and by identical twins I mean just one girl, cinema in the Savoy, and drinks after.
It was only when I mentioned to a handful of people that the film was essentially crap that I understood the extent to which such an opinion was deemed culturally irresponsible.
Was it – I don’t know – that I am not allowed, in Ireland, to slate a film starring Brendan Gleeson? Has he become the Irish Pacino? If I admit that his abilities are massive, can I at least say that his lines were sh*t?
Then I began to read reviews, and learn of international film festival accolades, and it hit me: the dark-humour/sentimental genre, to which In Bruges religiously belongs, has become the intellectual gold standard for people who don’t read but dress like they do.
— G.B.