281 words on Films
Den gode strømer – The good Cop – is last year’s film by Danish director Lasse Span Olsen, who did the fantastic I Kina spiser de hunde (In China they eat dogs) and its sequel Gamle mænd i nye biler (Old men in new cars). Both those films featured a criminal, cruel but well meaning restaurant owner and a few crimes he commits with and for his little brother. It manages to bring together the social and friendly aspects you’d associate with Scandinavian countries with absurd amounts of violence. Brutal crimes done ‘for good’.
The restaurant owner was played by Kim Bodnia who also is The good Cop – a Danish cop who tries to make sure that ‘his’ criminals won’t be treated badly and who tries to get them out of the trouble with bigger, more serious criminals, they get themselves into. He does all this by what could be considered lying to his boss about what he is doing and somehow things keep getting worse and worse rather than better, the more he tries to get people out of trouble.
It’s a funny story and Kim Bodnia is very good in it once again. Given by the setting of having a Danish police man doing dodgy things for good, the irony on the social and nice Danes is present much stronger than in the In China they eat Dogs film. But otherwise this film is much weaker than the other two. It’s nice entertainment, but not as funny or original as its predecessors and it looks like they ran out of new ideas and just tried to copy what worked well in the other films to a new one.