Master plans, regardless of one’s goals, require a full intensity of focus. Strong start, worthy objective, consistent follow-through: these are the qualities that ensure success, whether you’re making a great movie or, say, planning the biggest heist in Danish history.
Director Frederik Louis Hviid wants to give us that great movie about that huge heist. But like his hapless antiheroes, he’s made the fatal mistake of skipping a few essential steps.
It’s not that there isn’t a promising story here: He was inspired by a genuinely outrageous robbery in 2008. But inspiration alone won’t make anyone rich. And he and screenwriter Anders Frithiof August are simply missing too much: a proper blueprint, a satisfying payoff, even villains worth rooting for (or against, for that matter).
We open on a bank raid that goes wrong, in shockingly brutal and even heartbreaking fashion. It’s a daringly dark start, suggesting that August is ready to take some big risks. But the effort falls flat, since we soon learn that the team planning the next crime — the bigger, bolder one — couldn’t care less about any innocents who might get in the way.
Hviid and August are more ambivalent, leaving us initially confused and then disconnected. First they introduce us to Kasper (Gustav Giese), a rough-edged boxer who is noticeably sweet with his adorable little daughter, and openly emotional about his professional passion. Then we meet Maria (Amanda Collin), a solemnly dedicated security guard who works at the storage facility where untold riches are being held. There’s also Slimani (Reda Kateb), the Moroccan mastermind who encourages Kasper to bust those riches free, and Hasse (Christopher Wagelin), the aging career criminal who distrusts Kasper’s plan.
Hasse knows that any plot is doomed to fail if you cut corners. And though the actors are first class, they are hamstrung by a project that doesn’t yet feel finished. Maria is introduced to suggest a cat-and-mouse dynamic, and casually pushed aside before the game can begin. Kasper’s kind nature and professional passions are dismissed with strange haste. Motivations are lightly hinted at and then ignored; characters who initially show signs of complexity are soon revealed to be flatly two-dimensional.
Hviid takes the trouble to let us know where we are in several scenes, with titles announcing shifting settings like “Malmö, Sweden” or “Glostrup, Denmark.” But interchangeable conversations between ill-defined men in random rooms might as well take place anywhere. Similarly, the mood is built by heavy-handed color grading — icy blues, murky blacks, saturated sunlight — rather than dialogue, performance or action. (Martin Dirkov does get points for his suitably tense score.)
Even the theft itself is unexciting, as if the filmmakers believe the record-busting millions are all that matter. There’s no rule that every criminal has to be charismatic, or all their heists have to be heart-pounding. They just can’t commit the one sin that’s truly unforgivable: leaving us bored.
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