10 Movies Saved By One Single Cut

In Bruges is a masterful black comedy which walks delicately on a tonal tightrope between grim existentialism and absurd surrealism.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh sensibly cleaved a flashback sequence from the final cut of the film in order to maintain this balance, then, which focused on a younger version of antagonist Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes).

Though Matt Smith does a great job playing a young Harry, the scene lurches into outright silliness when he walks into a police station with a samurai sword and cuts a cop's head clean off.

Even accepting the daft unfinished visual effects in the home video version of the deleted scene, the violence is just too laughably cartoonish compared to the rest of the film and would've caused McDonagh's nimbly constructed house of cards to tumble.

Smith is absolutely believable as a younger Ralph Fiennes, but the scene otherwise doesn't even remotely convince and would've irreparably upended the tone McDonagh was shooting for.