Review: Perrier's Bounty (18)****

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In Bruges focused on a pair of hapless hit-men seeking a purpose against the backdrop of that fair Belgian city. Perrier's Bounty revolves around the desperate attempts of a young nobody, in hock to a powerful gangster, trying to pay back a loan.

Both films are built on deliciously spicy scripts. Never have bad guys philosophised with this much finesse or given such a pleasing patina of poetry to their profanity, of which there is a proliferation.

Cillian Murphy is Michael McCrea, a young chancer on the run with his father (Jim Broadbent) who, convinced he has been visited by the Angel of Death, refuses to sleep in case he is snatched away in the night. Then there is Brenda (Huddersfield actress Jodie Whittaker), Michael's neighbour, mourning the loss of her no-good boyfriend and responsible for Michael's escalating plight after shooting dead a local lowlife.

Brendan Gleeson is Perrier, the murderous crime lord who, faced with Michael's flight, places a bounty on his head. Together, this mixed bag of miscreants and victims will carve a bloody path through Dublin.

This fast, furious and frenetic black comedy offers some superb opportunities to its five-star ensemble that are not wasted. Chief scene-stealer is Broadbent, as the middle-aged worrier continually crunching raw coffee granules in a concerted attempt to avoid sleep.

Part road movie, part buddy flick and part romance, Perrier's Bounty actually defies the limiting pigeonholing effect that can reduce and constrain some films. Mark O'Rowe's sparkling, if salty screenplay, ensures that the principal cast gets some sensationally funny lines.

This is a whimsical Ireland that doubtless does not exist outside this particular fantasy. Fitzgibbon and O'Rowe combine to create a plausible world of voluble thugs, garrulous charmers, downtrodden depressives and, in a tour-de-force performance, Jim Broadbent's sleep-deprived neurotic.

Impossible to categorise and unique in its own cock-eyed way, Perrier's Bounty combines thrills, spills, gunplay and attack dogs to deliver a bizarre and wholly hypnotising travelogue through the less salubrious sectors of modern Oirland.