After the success of Denmark's first black comedy gangster film, In China They Eat Dogs (1999), which ended in the bloody demise of the bad boy gang, director Lasse Olsen has to create a 'prequel' in order to continue the story, Denmark's answer to The Sopranos. Olsen again demonstrates what fun you can have when you bring a disparate group of characters together. When Harald (Kim Bodnia) is freed from prison he returns to find his former gang of crooks overly concerned with the smooth running of his restaurant. Instead of hitting on the rival gang which has become too powerful in his absence, they are more interested in entering a pastry competition. Just as Harald is contemplating how to stage his comeback, he gets distracted by the revelation that his foster father, Munken, is dying.
Bodnia, who has become the face of the Danish movie hardman, with previous roles in Pusher (1996) and Bleeder (1999), reveals here a vulnerable side and will go to any lengths to fufill his foster father's last request. Munken has a biological son currently in prison in Sweden and despite what he has done, and the difficulty of kidnapping someone from prison, the gang of unlikely criminal masterminds go to the rescue.
While films like Pulp Fiction(1994) utilised comedy to make their ultra violent antics hip, Olsen goes one better. It is his blending of incongruous detail, unlikely characters and far-fetched stunts that makes this tragi-comedy above all a fantastic story beautifully told. Many European action thrillers are unable to reproduce the big budget antics of their US counterparts, and so we are accustomed to relying on good acting alone. Here you get both. Olsen, with his brother, established the first stunt school in Denmark in 87, and it shows in the sheer audacity of the action sequences, although he also uses digi effects as well. (The film was shot in 35m and edited in digi, and won the Hamburg Film Festival's Digi Award for its excellence in utilising this format).
Kim Bodnia gives one of his best performances as the emotionally inarticulate gang leader for whom nothing can block out the pain of seeing Munken wasting away. Sidekicks Peter (Jensen) and Martin (Kaas) provide just the right level of apologetic dumbness so that the situationist black comedy is never allowed to turn into farce. The running gag with Vuk (Patterson), who bears the brunt of Harald's bad temper, continues to amuse. The violence against women may alienate some viewers, but the film shows these men to be little boys unable to control their childish impulses, sexual, emotional or otherwise. The best action thriller to come out of Europe in years will also have you laughing from beginning to end.
Reviewed by Marcelle Perks
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