User Reviews

I watched this movie because I love seeing Michael Kitchen bring characters to life. Unfortunately, in this instance it felt like the director had paid good money for a Maserati, which he then lurched along at 30 MPH, stripping the gears and overheating the engine, instead of letting it go flat out. Rather than letting the actors do their jobs (act), it seemed to me like they were frog-marched and stage-managed through the film. "Ok, turn to the camera, and... blue steel. Yeah. Cut." What a waste of talent.

And maybe it was the fact that I don't speak Swedish, but it also seemed like there were too many facile connectors. Someone just happens to call who has the information the hero needs. Quoi? And then at the end, a poor woman for whom $50k is an almost unimaginable sum manages to track the uber-killer down in his lair in Malta and gun him down, even though the rich and highly-connected have never been able to find him. Eh?

Oh, well. Kitchen looked nice in his suits. Gotta love French cuffs under any circumstances.

Major Spoilers. Let me start out by saying that the convoluted plot of this film plays out like the wet dream of the Swedish left. They cannot buy the boring history that the prime minister was killed by a drunkard by mistake. Instead we have this. The Swedish prime minister is killed by a an assassin. The assassin has previously killed anti-apartheid activists. Behind the killing lies Swedish nazi and an unknown people high in the government hierarchy, wanting him killed because he works against nuclear weapons. In the end the assassin gets his just desserts.

The movie is full of left-wing tropes. A bartender expresses his dislike for the prime minister...so he must be a right wing extremist. Who else could possibly dislike prime minister Palme? (FYI: Palme was a very confrontative and acidic person and roughly half the people in the country disliked him). The right wing are skinhead Nazis led by mysterious men in suits.

What did I miss? Probably a lot, there are huge plot holes. The protagonist, the young police, always seems to magically find himself near the assassin when something happens and can photo meetings and payoffs. The police magically get tips and have recordings. All this is hidden in a massive cover-up even before the murder. In a similar manner, the assassins hired help repeatedly finds himself in a sauna with the prime minister. In short the makers of this film put together a movie from their wet dream plot, made up with what they thought to be interesting scenes, without properly connecting the dots. Add the tropes of Swedish filmmaking with emotion being showed by swearing like a madman and what you have is simply not a very good film, but not bad enough to be a turkey.

PS. I hope I used "trope" in the correct manner.