Last Will
- Year:2012
- Rating:M
- Director:Peter Flinth
- Cast:Leif Andrée, Malin Crépin, Björn Kjellman, Richard Ulfsäter
- Release Date:September 20, 2012
- Distributor:Rialto
- Running time:93 minutes
- Film Worth:$11.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
A thriller that’s too cliched, formulaic and slick to register as anything other than occasionally intriguing.
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The original title of this film translates as the more indicative Nobel’s Last Will. It’s set for the most part in Stockholm (with brief excursions to Germany and Latvia), and concerns a murder at the annual Nobel Banquet and its aftermath. The intended victim is apparently an Israeli scientist called Aaron Wiesel, who has just received the medicine prize for his stem-cell research, and his would-be assassins are supposedly a terrorist group called Neue Jihad.
One of the stock cliches in this kind of “thriller” is that the initial suspect is always the wrong one, and sure enough, Wiesel (who survives) was not the target; terrorists were not the perpetrators; and someone who did get killed – the female chairperson of the Nobel Committee – may have been whacked on purpose. We know virtually all of this from the get-go, and then have to watch crime reporter, Annika Bengtzon (Malin Crepin), ironing out the details. Annika happened to be at the ceremony, witnessed the murder, and soon suspects that there is more to the story than meets the eye. The cops try to gag her, her boss is initially unable to give her a free rein…you know the drill.
What follows is briefly intriguing but lengthily boring. For a conspiracy mystery, Last Will is too predictable. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo it ain’t, and every plot twist is signposted either by symbolic music or giveaway dialogue. After a few sparks of suspense, it degenerates into formulaic dullness. It might, paradoxically, have been better with a smaller budget. The smothering slickness and blandly “perfect” production values mean that it could just as easily have been made in Hollywood. And no doubt, it soon will be.
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