10 Crime Comedies That Turn Being Lost in the Wrong Place Into Pure Comedy
Picture this: you're three episodes deep into what you expected to be a straight crime film, and something has quietly shifted. The characters are fumbling. The setting is hostile in a way nobody planned for. And the laughs — when they come — don't feel bolted on. They feel like the natural consequence of people being exactly the wrong type of person in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.
That's the displacement comedy. It's a specific gear inside the crime-film engine, and when it works properly it's one of the most satisfying things genre cinema produces. The comedy doesn't come from gags or one-liners. It comes from the collision between who these characters think they are and where they actually are. Geography becomes character. Landscape becomes punchline.
The films below do that well. Some are classics, some are overlooked, and at least one — a Lithuanian-British co-production from 2014 — does it better than almost anything in recent memory. Here are ten worth your time, ranked loosely by how central the displacement is to the film's whole structure.
1. In Bruges (2008)
The gold standard for this kind of film. Two hitmen — Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson — are sent to Bruges, Belgium after a job goes wrong, and the film's entire comic engine runs on the gap between what Bruges is (a preserved medieval city, famously beautiful, full of tourists and churches) and what these two men are equipped to do with it. Farrell's Ray hates it. Gleeson's Ken loves it. The collision between their reactions, and the impossibility of acting like normal criminals in this very particular setting, generates almost every laugh in the movie. Martin McDonagh's script is extraordinarily well-constructed, and the film holds up completely on rewatch because the comedy is structural, not situational. In Bruges is the template every displacement crime comedy gets measured against.
2. Fargo (1996)
Joel and Ethan Coen's masterwork runs a subtler version of the displacement formula. Jerry Lundegaard is not from the wrong country, but he is catastrophically the wrong man for the crime he's trying to arrange. He doesn't belong in the world of Carl and Gaear Grimsrud; they don't belong in Brainerd, Minnesota; nobody in this film belongs in the situation they find themselves in. The setting — the flat, snow-blanketed Midwest, the accents, the relentless politeness — amplifies every catastrophe. Marge Gunderson investigating a multiple homicide while heavily pregnant and cheerfully eating a sausage McMuffin is one of cinema's great displacement images. The comedy of Fargo is inseparable from its geography.
3. A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Charles Crichton's heist comedy is fundamentally about cultural displacement masquerading as romantic comedy. Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline are American criminals navigating a British criminal operation and, more painfully, the British social world around it. John Cleese's barrister is the British everyman destroyed by proximity to the Americans. The comedy comes from the mutual incomprehension — two cultures that share a language but absolutely do not share a set of assumptions about how to behave, what's funny, or what constitutes basic human decency. Kline's Oscar-winning turn as Otto is the film's most committed displacement performance: a man so confident he belongs everywhere who is, in fact, comprehensively unsuited to wherever he happens to be.
4. Midnight Run (1988)
Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin spend a cross-country road trip being completely wrong for each other's company, which is its own kind of displacement. De Niro's bail bondsman needs to get Grodin's accountant from New York to Los Angeles; Grodin refuses to fly; the Mafia and the FBI are both following them. The physical displacement of the transcontinental journey becomes a container for the character displacement — two men with incompatible approaches to life forced into prolonged proximity. The film is warmer than most in this list, which is part of what makes it work. The displacement comedy here ends in genuine affection rather than bodies. That's a less common resolution than it sounds.
5. The Guard (2011)
John Michael McDonagh — Martin's brother, which perhaps explains the shared sensibility — put an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) in rural County Galway and set him alongside a singularly strange local Garda (Brendan Gleeson, doing something completely different here than he did in In Bruges). The film runs the displacement double: Cheadle's American federal agent is out of place in rural Ireland, and Gleeson's Sergeant Boyle is out of place in the professional world the FBI agent represents. The comedy of incompetence — two men who are each competent in their own context, completely baffled by each other's — is very well observed. The Connemara setting does its own comic work, beautiful and bleak in the way rural western Ireland tends to be when you weren't expecting it.
6. Redirected (2014)
Four British criminals — played by Vinnie Jones, Scot Williams, Gil Darnell, and Oliver Jackson — arrive in Vilnius after a London job goes wrong, and spend much of the film stranded in rural Lithuania with dwindling cash and no clear plan. Emilis Vėlyvis's film is the purest example of the displacement formula in this list, because the displacement is the plot rather than the backdrop to a plot. These men are not visiting Lithuania. They are trapped there. The setting actively works against them — the language barrier, the unfamiliar criminal landscape, the absence of the networks and social codes that would normally allow British crime-world professionals to function. What makes the film genuinely good rather than merely competent is that Lithuania is not played as exotic or threatening for its own sake. It's just a place, doing what places do to people who don't understand them. For a full breakdown of the film's genre mechanics see our complete guide to Redirected and the heist comedy reference piece.
7. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Shane Black's directorial debut sent Robert Downey Jr.'s petty thief into Hollywood — a world he has absolutely no preparation for — alongside Val Kilmer's private detective, who is gay, which was not what Downey's character was expecting either. The film runs several displacement tracks simultaneously: the New York criminal in Los Angeles, the normal person in the movie industry, the audience in a film that keeps breaking its own conventions. It's the most self-aware entry in this list, which is both a strength and occasionally a weakness. When Black's script trusts the displacement to do the work without commentary, the film is excellent. When it commentates on itself, it slackens slightly. Still one of the better crime comedies of its decade.
8. The Brothers Bloom (2008)
Rian Johnson's con-artist film sends two American brothers — Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo — across Europe and then to Montenegro, picking up Rachel Weisz's bored New Jersey heiress along the way. The film is less tightly structured than the others in this list, and some of its pleasures are more impressionistic than comic. But it does something interesting with displacement: the Bloom brothers have spent their lives performing different identities in different places, which means they are always displaced, and the comedy of the film turns partly on what happens when someone who has no fixed authentic self meets someone (Weisz) who is desperately searching for one. It's the most romantic of these films, and the least cynical about what displacement does to people.
9. Seven Psychopaths (2012)
Martin McDonagh again — displacement seems to be something he thinks about structurally, which isn't surprising given his background in theatre. Colin Farrell's screenplay-writing character is an Irish-American in Los Angeles trying to write a film called Seven Psychopaths, and the film itself is simultaneously that film and a commentary on that film. Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken orbit him, a dog-kidnapping scheme escalates into a gangland confrontation, and the whole thing eventually migrates to the Californian desert for a third act that is either brilliant or self-indulgent depending on your tolerance for meta-fiction. The displacement is partly physical (Ireland to Hollywood) and partly generic (crime film to comedy to something that resists categorisation).
10. The Nice Guys (2016)
Shane Black's second entry on this list puts Russell Crowe's enforcer and Ryan Gosling's incompetent private detective into 1970s Los Angeles — a city that is always slightly wrong, always slightly too bright and too corrupt, always a setting that makes normal professional competence feel absurd. The period displacement matters here: 1970s LA is far enough from the present that its textures feel strange, close enough that you can recognise everything. Crowe and Gosling are funny together in ways that rely on both actors playing against type, and the mystery they're investigating is layered in a way that rewards attention. Of the newer films in this list, The Nice Guys is probably the most purely enjoyable as a commercial entertainment.
What these films have in common
None of the ten films above are comedies first and crime films second. The order matters. They establish the stakes and mechanics of the criminal situation — the job, the complication, the escape — and then let the comedy emerge from how badly equipped the characters are for what they've got themselves into. The setting does the work. The location is not decoration; it's structural.
This is different from how most crime comedies operate. The typical mode is to add comic characters or comic dialogue to a crime situation. The displacement films invert the equation: they put recognisable criminal types into settings that don't accommodate them, and let the comedy be the natural consequence of that incompatibility.
The American film preservation tradition tends to celebrate crime films for their realism — their accurate rendering of criminal environments. Displacement crime comedies tend to do something more interesting: they render environments accurately and then drop characters into them who have no business being there. The realism stays; the comedy comes from the mismatch. According to film scholars at screen studies programs, hybrid genres succeed when both elements feel genuine rather than one serving as decoration for the other. Every film on this list gets that balance right in its own way.
The Guardian's film section has tracked the slow commercial decline of the mid-budget crime comedy over the past decade, which makes the displacement variant more valuable rather than less — it's a form that doesn't require enormous budgets precisely because the comedy comes from situation rather than spectacle. The National Endowment for the Arts has similarly noted that independent and international genre productions often preserve formal possibilities that larger studio production has moved away from.
Redirected, made for approximately $2.7 million with Lithuanian state and tax-incentive support, is the clearest recent example of what the form can do at small scale with the right material.
Where to go next
If these films have put you in the right frame of mind, the site has more on the specific corner of the genre that Redirected occupies: