The Last Viking Review – Mads Mikkelsen imagines he’s John Lennon in a Von Trier-ish comedy | Video

Anders Thomas Jensen is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and veteran of Dogme 95 at Denmark’s Zentropa Studios. Now he brings us a brutal black slapstick tale and a very silly dog ​​story. It’s well done but relentless and incredibly unfunny. Too unpleasant to be funny, but not really, because unpleasantness approaches the level of being funny, though not quite there. It may be that the irony of Zentropa’s black lord of the prank, Lars von Trierit is rotating somewhere in the corner of the frame.

Mads Mikkelsen is the opposite of Manfred, a crippled victim whose brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) robs a bank. Before he is arrested, Anker gives Manfred the key to the train lock where he hid it, and tells him to retrieve the money when the police go to bury him behind his old family’s abusive father.

But when he gets out of prison 15 years later, Anker discovers that Manfred is back in the dark, believing himself to be John Lennon, and is so frustrated with anyone who doesn’t believe him that he can’t remember where he buried the money. So Anker, with the help of a cruel lunatic nurse, has to collect three more errant cases that variously believe themselves to be Ringo, Paul and George in order to reunite the group in the remote Danish forest for several numbers, hoping that Manfred will relax enough to remember where to start digging.

It’s a funny but tired scene: I laughed at Mikkelsen’s crazy jokes at first before realizing that the film is nothing but a violent, humorless genre. Jensen has many talents as a filmmaker but comedy was not one of them. Sofie Gråbøl he does his best as a martial arts enthusiast who now owns a house for the boys’ family.