Rating :   53/100                                                                     116 Min       

Norwegian film starring Stellan Skarsgård that features a now fairly commonplace Scandinavian model of gory violence coupled with black humour, and just as with a number of its contemporaries the slow delivery coupled with language translational issues all but ruins the comedy for the most part, in fact many of the scenes themselves have been visually slowed down in the editing suite making things even worse and resulting in a final film that’s pretty tough to remain interested in. Skarsgård plays a grieving father who has just lost his son, and only child, but when he discovers that a murderous drug dealing gang were responsible he goes on the warpath, hell bent on deadly vengeance.

The first section of the film is dark and serious as the body count rises, then more comedic elements come in and by the end the film doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to be. The tone has been lowered to the point where we no longer care about who lives and who dies and all notions about the morality of revenge have disappeared, swallowed by mundane and unoriginal gangster film clichés as a rival gang, the Serbians, get involved, no one realising that a one man army is responsible for the sudden disappearance of many of the region’s less respectable citizens. It’s almost certainly better if you understand Norwegian, but it still needed a lot more skill behind the camera and from the screenplay itself. Also with Bruno Ganz as the head of the Serbian family.