Sam Worthington Jim Sturgess Anthony Hopkins. Dir. Daniel Alfredson, Alchemy, 2015
Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, and their two best mates are stereotypical English Lads, living abroad in Amsterdam, where they own a successful contstruction company. Fluctuations in the market force them to sell their assets to meet payroll, sending them to a bank seeking a loan. The bank unjustly declines to lend money to the Lads, whose personal, now-sold, assets consisted not of bonds and portfolios but sports cars, pleasure boats, and race horses. Denied access to more of same, what are four victims of oppression, and likely Lads, to do?
Why, kidnap Freddy Heineken, the man who made Heineken ale a billion-dollar brand and ransom him for £35M, of course. What else?
If you're thinking our protagonists sound like less than put-upon victims of injustice and more like entitled prats with a deeply challenged sense of morality, welcome to Daniel Alfredson's clever, stylish Eurothriller, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, in which the action, seen from the point of view of the Lads, doesn't make them look all that heroic, which seems strange since they're the main characters.
Therein lies Alfredson's sly trick. We see the events from the POV of the main characters, yes, but not the protagonists or the heroes. The protagonist is Hopkins, a shrewd businessman and judge of human character, whose occasional editorial comments to his abuctors lay bare all their narcissism, their duplicity, and their inability to trust one another. Hopkins simply points out to them, and us, what should have been immediately obvious: guys who kidnap a person so they can buy more Ferraris are unlikely to make reliable partners in a criminal enterprise. Lo and behold, he's right.
From the moment of his abduction, Hopkins's words and presence overshadows and dictates virtually all the story, which turns into a long, tense, paranoid exercise in the inevitable. The friends turn on one another, abandon each other, rob one another and, divided by their greed and suspicion, they fall, one by one. The two who last the longest, the leaders, played by Sturgess and Worthington, fall farthest, as the real-life figures got out of prison and took over the Dutch underworld in the 1990s, but the point is made. Willingness to do evil, and doing it, changes people, or perhaps makes them more who they were all along, but no one emerges unscathed. It's not possible to do bad things and remain a good person, even if you want to, and even if you don't believe you're evil. Wrong is wrong, even if you seem like a swell guy.
It's not a wildly original set of conclusions - Crime doesn't pay because people who commit crimes are criminals not fun dudes - but it's a somewhat original way to arrive at them and, if the Hopkins scenes (almost certainly shot separately and edited together later) remind us strongly of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, it's an homage which also serves Alfredson's agenda. Alfredson, who directed two of the Swedish versions of Stieg Larsson's Lizbeth Salander trilogy, certainly knows how to make your basic slick, atmospheric Eurothriller. I watched it first on a Saturday of all action movies and it's not really an action movie, but it's an effective character study, morality play, and psychological long con rolled into one good-looking, fast-moving film. Not transcendant, but better than average. The kind of movie that names this blog. I wasn't looking for Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, but I'm happy I found it along the way.
Comments
Post a Comment