Small-time crooks/big-time psychopaths (with comic edge to their violence) had become something of a genre unto itself by the time this Danish iteration, from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen, came out. Two & a half decades on, there’s not much surprise or kick left to it. What it does offer is a chance to watch a young, lean Mads Mikkelsen as one of the four thuggish grifters making small change smuggling in contraband goods, like tax-free cigarettes. ‘Menthol!,’ Mikkelsen grouses before laying out the confused Polish driver. But it’s the next job that launches the main action when the four guys pick up a locked suitcase that contains too much dough to deliver without taking a 100% cut, hatching a plan to enjoy their profits by running off to Barcelona. Naturally the intended party for the cash-filled suitcase is none too happy with things and the hunt is on as one small mob goes after another. And this is where Jensen doubles down from quirky to absurd as our gang of thieves (plus an on & off girlfriend of little intuition) find a dilapidated house, formerly a country restaurant, now abandoned, they plan to restore. Too bad no one knows how to cook. But under the informal protection of a couple of equally oddball locals, the project starts coming together. Tricked out with short daytrips, a slow-healing gunshot wound, walks on the beach, hunting down farm animals and flashbacks to character-defining crises from childhood, the film devolves into a fable. Not without its shocks, laughs and nifty resolutions, the problem less that so much is absurd as that so much is secondhand absurd.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *You can get a good sense of Mikkelsen’s exceptional range, pretty much right from the start, comparing his young Robert De Niro act here (even in build) to his equally convincing Gregory Peck solid physicality in the WWII spy drama FLAME & CITRON/’06. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/flammen-og-citronen-flame-and-citron.html
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