Farrell back in full flight after Irish offering at Sundance

HOLLYWOOD bad boy Colin Farrell is back — with a bang.

Farrell back in full flight after Irish offering at Sundance

His new film, In Bruges, opened the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night and already critics are hailing it as his comeback movie.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride for the Dublin-born actor since he shot to international fame in Joel Schumacher’s low-budget Tigerland.

But after a few naff movies and periods in rehab, critics say his role as a contract killer in award-winning Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s terrific Coen Brothers-like tale is the one that will catapult him back into Hollywood’s A-list.

Farrell stars alongside Brendan Gleeson as two hitmen. After a botched job, their boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, sends them to Bruges for a break where they are forced to look at their lives and professions.

McDonagh, who has won two Olivier Awards for plays The Pillow Man and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, said many of his plays have featured dark comedy.

He described In Bruges as a story about guilt and trying to be an honourable person, and in the end, friendship between the two hitmen.

It’s McDonagh’s debut as a feature film director since his Academy Award for his 2004 short Six Shooter.

One of 58 first-time directors at what is the top event for US independent film, McDonagh, 37, said he was “completely thrilled and horrified” at the prospect of screening his movie before the notoriously fussy audiences at Sundance.

“I am turning a new page in my career and am terrified about whether I have a good one,” he said.

“Having watched a lot of films about macho men with guns, I always wondered, when there’s 100 bullets being shot off in a street, where do all those extra bullets go?

“How does a decent person, however criminal, react when a bullet hits someone it wasn’t intended to, how do they deal with that morality, that guilt and then that despair.”

The film is “brutal, philosophical, funny and totally original”, said Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore.

“It’s about killing people, but it’s funny.”

Festival founder Robert Redford said the event is designed to discover a new generation of filmmakers typified by McDonagh and his In Bruges.

He said many of the first-time directors in this year’s festival were like McDonagh — artists in one field who had crossed over into movie-making.

“This is a new group that is saying, ‘we don’t want to inherit anything before us,” he said.

The festival will continue over the next week with more than 120 feature films in Park City, a mountain town east of Salt Lake City.

Other hyped movies include What Just Happened? starring Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, Sunshine Cleaning with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt and Be Kind Rewind with Jack Black.

Previously discovered films at Sundance include the 1989 global hit Sex, Lies and Videotape, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and the dark Scottish film Trainspotting.

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