Good start, but then it gets ruined

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This movie is the proof that in some -though rare- occasions the film adaptation of a book is better than the novel itself. ''Snabba Cash'' is based on the trilogy of crime novels written by one of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in today's Stockholm, Jens Lapidus, so there are two more films (Snabba Cash 2-''Hard To Kill'' and Snabba Cash 3-''Life Deluxe''). The writer's invaluable professional experiences and communication with real criminals benefit the realism element in the book and is reflected both in the wonderful descriptions of Stockholm's ugly side as well as the ''natural'' dialogues. As far as the film is concerned I believe that the first one is the best of the three, directed by Daniel Espinoza (''Den fördömde'', ''Child 44'') and starring a wonderful cast with Joel Kinnaman (JW), Dragomir -''Gago''- Mrsic (Mrado) and Cristian Varela (Jorge) as the three main protagonists. The movie is a penetrative look at Stockholm's underbelly nowadays, following the lives of JW, a young lad from Sweden's countryside who uses his bright mind in order to invade Stockholm's aristocrats' social circle, Mrado who is a Serbian mafioso and enforcer with a little daughter and finally Jorge, a Latin immigrant who manages to escape from prison and frantically search an effective way in order to make easy money. The lives of those three intersect and a well-crafted plot, which remains faithful to the book, is beginning to unfold in front of the reader's eyes. This is a fast-paced film with some action and really great characters: Mrado is more than convincing as the Yugoslavian thug causing pain and disaster as Dragomir Mrsic (who was himself a bank robber, arrested at 1990 and sentenced to three and a half years of incarceration in Hall prison) delivers a totally brilliant performance which shows that the Bosnia and Herzegovina born actor has a lot of potentials. His acting is one of the -many- highlights of the film while both Kinnaman and Varela deliver more than satisfying performances of their roles. I would also like to mention Dejan Cukic who is terrific in a rather brief appearance, incarnating the Serbian mob boss Radovan.''Snabba Cash'' is a fast-tempo modern-day film which proves that Europeans can produce great films of the crime genre. This is an absolute must-see for all crime fiction addicts.

Illegal trade is profitable because there's less competition: prohibition puts most people off, and restricts supply. But without the law to protect you, the competition there is tends to be bloody and violent (which itself serves to further reduce supply). The perfect white collar crime might never be quite as clean as it seems: if someone else wants a piece of your action, things are going to get messy. Daniel Espinosa's film 'Easy Money' is a serviceable thriller, well-done in itself but not especially original. A social climbing business student sees an opportunity to offer his services to a drug smuggling gang; but soon finds that being a money launderer is not quite as simple as he'd hoped. Some details of the plot make less than perfect sense: "take over a private bank and gain access to equity worth 30 times what you pay for it" is a plan that surely needs more explanation. What's good about the drama is that it shows the gang war from multiple sides: the characters may be rotten, but they're still all human, and each with their own mixed motives for the bad things they do. There's nothing here you won't have seen before, but the execution is better than average.

JW (Joel Kinnaman) is a poor economics student who is dabbing in questionable money making schemes while faking a double life with his rich acquaintances. He falls for the rich Sophie (Lisa Henni). Jorge (Matias Varela) has just escaped from jail. JW and Jorge is working for the Albanian drug lord Abdulkarim who is trying to put together a big shipment. Meanwhile Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic) is a Serbian enforcer. The Serbian are going to war with Abdulkarim but Mrado has a new responsibility in his daughter and he's planning a final score to get out of it all.Mrado says that people start becoming greedy and scared. That's what I love about this story. Everybody is a bastard. Nobody is safe. JW thinks he's smarter than he actually is, and he never truly understands that he's expendable. I love how Jorge breaks it all down for JW, and the two men's complicated relationship. There are no angels here, just survivors.

Imagine a two-hour long church sermon, the point of which is to convince you that getting into trafficking narcotics is going to make you thoroughly miserable. In a nutshell, that is what this movie is like.It is visually stylish in places. It's watchable. If you have nothing better to do of an evening, and you find yourself in close proximity to a DVD of this movie, by all means go ahead and give it a shot. Judging from the other reviews apparently some people like it.I, however, did not like this movie much at all.. Firstly the film makes the colossal mistake of trying to appear realistic, whilst blatantly not being. Other reviewers have attacked the plot as being the main issue in terms of lack of realism-- or the stereotyped portrayal of the various ethnic groups that are shown in the film. These issues aren't really what make this film so wholly unbelievable though. "University student gets involved with a bunch of drug-running gangsters..." Sure, it is perhaps a bit improbable, but stranger things have happened... And yes, the stereotyping is irritating, but there's nothing particularly implausible about it. No. The thing that makes this so flaming unrealistic is that there is barely a glimmer of humor. The characters are uniformly miserable. There's almost zero jesting. There's no monkeying around. It's just gloom, gloom, gloom all the way through. Okay guys-- we get it-- if you get involved with gangsters your life will become utterly miserable... The only thing I'm unsure about is whether the writer and director are actually living in such a well-insulated middle-class bubble that, in spite of having presumably done some research on the topic, they still think that this is what life is like for those involved in the criminal underworld.Now, don't get me wrong-- I'm not insistent on realism in my gangster flicks. I love Tarantino, which has tendencies to be even more unrealistic (though in a totally different manner)... The problem here is that the film doesn't really have anything to make up for all this miserable sermonizing. I like the visual style... but none of the male characters really grab you. Actually by far my favorite character was the love-interest, Sophie... (And I don't think this was entirely a question of her being far more enjoyable to look at)... there was a sense of realism to her character, and roundedness, which the others lacked. Perhaps it's just that the director gave her the freedom to smile occasionally! However her role is pretty incidental to the plot, and she doesn't get all that much screen time-- so in the end we're mainly just left with a bunch of miserable blokes for the two hour slog...