This movie is a bunch of cliches lumped together, but compared to any Marvel/DC/Hasbro or other explosion movie it might actually seem good. It could have been profound though, considering the material it was based on.
The only parts I appreciated somewhat were the flashbacks, but the modern day parts were just awful. The worst character was the all evil villain. Such people simply don't exist, and he was just used as a crutch to move the story along.
Looking at the Nordics as a whole we do make much better movies than this. I'm a Swede, but I especially like Danish movies. Swedish movies tend to lean towards theatrics, which in my opinion is a bad thing. We make many police/agent movies, and they become a bit laughable (and cringe-worthy) due to this. This is actually changing (maybe a generation thing), and younger actors tend to act more naturalistic.
And no, it was not better the FG. FG was philosophical in the sense that it challenged the "success is not caused by chance, but through hard work, yada yada" dogma. All FG's successes were through chance and he was almost completely ignorant throughout. People have a tendency to create a cause (luck, effort, right etc) even when the "cause" was completely random and beyond our control. I'm not talking fate. That's something else.
But as we say in Sweden: Smaken är som baken: delad (Taste is like the buttocks: divided; if I remember correctly, Forrest Gump was shot in the buttocks).
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JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies
8 years ago
Such people simply don't exist,
So you thought this was a realist work?
The realism fetish sucks.
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animalmother60
8 years ago
Actually, you think such cartoonish people don't exist, but I guarantee, they do.
They are rare, but they are out there.
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redrum-03370
8 years ago
I felt the villains were portrayed as multidimensional. Take Ricky for example. The guy was an emotional wreck when his gf dumped him. If you're saying villains such as Alan Ford's character don't exist in real life, I assure you they do. Watching this with my brother and his wife we all loved the scenes with the Pim character in part because he reminds us so much of our dad's brother... The look, the speech. I think it's characteristic of a certain criminal class Londoner fom that generation. Our uncle is a career criminal with a one sided view of life, meaning anything that's not good for him is bad for him. People are objects to use toward an end goal and there are literally no people in his life that are above any of this. When I was a kid he commented about two people he had killed and there was no remorse at all. It was like he was telling me about mailing two letters... In other words, no one matters to him unless they can be used. In his eighties he hasn't mellowed but he's lost his clout within the criminal milieu. Not dangerous anymore but still a man so evil that he would gladly kill anyone in his family, including his children if they crossed him. When he dies, no one will mourn.
As for this fim, I enjoyed the random aspects and the fact that people who didn't know each other the day before are thrust into this crazy journey. total strangers are willing to become accomplices after the fact to murder and even help dispose of dead bodies. I guess I enjoyed the amoral element of the story.
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