Jackpot
(Arme Riddere)
When
your number’s up…
Jackpot, the latest Scandinavian Noir to hit UK
cinemas, begins as it means to go on with a scene that could almost serve as a
metaphor for the entire story. A
couple of rowdy, drunken doofus’ (doofi?), just out for a good time, drive up to strip
bar/porn emporium Pink Heaven on the Norwegian/Swedish border in the middle of
the day and are promptly blown away when they walk through the doors and
straight into a violent gun-battle.
Fate is a bitch and luck only comes in two flavours; bad and dumb.
When the smoke
clears, there’s eight bodies on the floor and trapped beneath an obese
stripper’s corpse, bloody and battered, clutching an empty shotgun, is main
suspect, and sole survivor, Oscar (Kyrre Hellum). How
fate and dumb luck came to put him there is the tale he recounts to the
skeptical Inspector Solar (Henrik Mestad) in a twisty series of comic flashbacks that thumb
their nose at The Usual Suspects.
Oscar is the
foreman at an artificial Christmas tree plant, supervising a workforce mostly
made up of ex-cons. Good-natured
and mild-mannered, he gets on well with his workers and is coerced into joining
a work football pool syndicate consisting of childhood friend and perpetual
screw-up Thor (Mads Ousdal), cheerful Dan (Andreas Cappelen) and volatile psychopath Billy (Arthur Berning).
When the quartet beat the odds and win the jackpot, it doesn’t take long
for Billy to work out that the four-way split would go much further if there
were only three of them. Or maybe
two. Or maybe just one.
As the knives
(and hammers come out) and the motley crew double- and triple-cross each other,
events spiral out of control leading to a rising death toll, a spot of amateur
body disposal involving the factory wood chipper, a lost decapitated head and a
field of hungry pigs. Meanwhile
Oscar’s nosy landlord, ex-cop Gjedde (Fridtjov Saheim) is sniffing around, trying to figure out
just why Oscar’s redecorating his flat in the middle of the night. And there’s the small matter of Thor’s unpaid
debts to local gangster and strip joint owner Lasse (Peter Andersson)…
As stylish,
slick and fast-moving as Morten Tyldum’s adaptation of Headhunters, Magnus Martens’ Jackpot sees the King of Nordic Noir, Jo Nesbø,
in a much more playful mood. Like
a Coen Brothers movie on a coke binge, Jackpot is a grimy, darkly funny tale of
dishonor among thieves that rattles along at a cracking pace and will make you
think twice about joining that work Lottery syndicate your co-workers keep
badgering you about. It may lack
the fiendish plotting of Headhunters but it doesn’t need it; Jackpot is a
down-and-dirty, blue collar noir where Headhunters was a exquisitely groomed,
glossy crime thriller. It’s savage
and brutal, the violence a punchline to the action, as our increasingly
beleaguered hero staggers from one increasingly screwed-up situation to the
next, just trying to come out of the whole ordeal alive and quid’s in.
The performances
are perfect, Kyrre Hellum is gret as the hapless Oscar, an unreliable narrator
who may not be as innocent as he makes out, Henrik Mestad is excellent as the
eccentric, deadpan, and very funny, cop and Mads Ousdal is good fun as lunkhead
Thor. Peter Andersson and Arthur
Berning give good scary bad guy and the film just never slows or lets up long
enough to let you pick holes in its plot.
Martens keeps the script tight and he and cinematographer Trond
Hoines deliver a vision
of rural Norway as seedy and deadly as any LA back alley or Texas border town.
Short, sharp
and deliciously, gorily funny, Jackpot is a gleefully violent crime caper that
takes no prisoners.
David Watson
Directed
by:
Written
by:
Produced
by:
Starring:
Kyrre Hellum,
Henrik Mestad,
Marie Blokhus,
Mads Ousdal,
Andreas Cappelen,
Arthur Berning,
Peter Andersson, Fridtjov
Saheim
Genres:
Language:
Norwegian
Runtime:
1
hour 26 minutes
Certificate:
15
Rating:
4/5
UK
Release Date:
10th
of August 2012
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