Photo Courtesy Focus Features

When an established writer truly 'writes,' there's always the potential of the remarkable. When a writer 'directs,' there's more clearly the potential of failure. Acclaimed playwright and Academy Award-winning shorts filmmaker, Martin McDonagh makes his serio-comic feature debut In Bruges in a transition rip with brilliance but halted by flourishes of overblown quirk and melodrama.

When hit man Ray (Colin Farrell) botches his first assignment, boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) exiles the naive man-boy and his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) to the idyllic "hellhole" Bruges, Belgium. While waiting for further instruction from Harry, the two tour the city, meeting along the way a motley cast of characters--drug hustling beauty Chloë (Clémence Poésy), easily irate actor Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), eccentric arms dealer Yuri (Eric Godon) and stubborn and pregnant hotel owner Marie (Thekla Reuten). As Ray struggles with self-forgiveness and questions in examining the disturbing painting of Hieronymus Bosch, the existence of heaven and hell, In Bruges erupts in laugh out loud moments of political incorrectness and odd turns of unexpected violence.

In his most mature and well-crafted performance to date, Farrell sketches Ray without a hint of mockery, rolling off every line with an endearing honesty. Gleeson, to counter, plays pathos in quiet and mesmerizing strokes, his performance the hypnotic thread that connects Bruges to the vivid extremes of the story. Completing the trio, Fiennes builds a focused and malleable ruthlessness that's profoundly welcome in its light-heartedness. A tight knit of casting, the actors blend their strengths, enhancing each other in order to pull off the stringent moral messages of McDonagh's prose.

In Bruges stumbles however when it shirks off its humor to play court to drama, Carter Burwell's score making laughable the tonal shifts in the latter part of the film. In shifting his gaze, McDonagh does so with jarring distinction between sentimentality and emotional non sequitur. An extended chase segment crops up that at first seems to kill the film, but fortunately, because of a deft bit of writing and strong performances by Farrell and Fiennes, only sullies the waters.

Despite the faults in approaching the ending, and in fact, despite the pat circular nature of the moral messages, In Bruges ends triumphantly with the perfect lines, at the perfect moment. It's a story fully realized, its starkly apparent faults and all.

For more information on the film, visit the site here.