by Annette Basile
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sofie Gråbøl, Bodil Jørgensen, Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro
Intro:
… a highly entertaining and sometimes emotional ride …
Throw it all into the pot – black comedy, crime thriller, emotional family drama, satire and then some – and you get this genre-jumping gem from Anders Thomas Jensen (Riders of Justice).
Here, Mads Mikkelsen is the withdrawn and troubled Manfred – who prefers to be called John, as in John Lennon. Call him Manfred and he will immediately try to commit suicide by any means he can find. Manfred has Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Syndrome) and he thinks that he is the famous Liverpudlian.
John (we shall now refer to him by his preferred name, so as to not upset him further) has clearly suffered trauma in his past. He’s the only one who knows precisely where millions of kroner stolen by his brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is buried. Anker has just finished a 15-year stint in jail, and he’s desperate to get his hands on the cash. As is Flemming (Nicolas Bro), Anker’s psychopathic accomplice in the robbery of a cash handling company.
The brothers find themselves at their old childhood home in the countryside, where the money is buried somewhere. But they are not alone. It’s an Airbnb now, and the new owners are there, and, via various circumstances, an ensemble of quirky characters with psychiatric issues along with a psychiatrist, Lothar (Lars Brygmann) from the ward where John was an inpatient after his most recent suicide attempt.
As the past is revealed in effective flashbacks, and the present is taken up by Anker trying to get John to tell him where the money is buried, there’s something else going on – a Beatles reunion of sorts, engineered by Lothar as a form of treatment for John. Lothar has tracked down two psychiatric patients with Beatles delusions – one who thinks that he’s Ringo Starr and one who believes he’s Paul McCartney or George Harrison, depending on which day it is.
It’s all quite amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and the genre mash-up gels remarkably well … to a point. In the third act, the film veers into violence – this segment is unsettling and seemingly made for a different audience. It will potentially turn off viewers who were expecting a black dramedy.
Yet, with its themes of identity (nearly everyone here is deluded in some way) and trauma worked into Jensen’s cracking script, The Last Viking is generally a highly entertaining and sometimes emotional ride – just be prepared for that dark detour.
