Good idea lost in the noise

A different way of telling a story

The first must-see film of the year.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

If this is the best Commander Hamilton movie, I have no curiosity about the others.A movie actor's greatest tools are his eyes, but when Peter Stormare wants to show great emotion, he closes his, so for five or six seconds we get to admire his eyelids while his feelings remain unknown behind them. Lousy acting technique.Stormare also flinches sometimes when he fires a gun, turning his head away and clamping his eyes shut. Watch carefully. James Bond can rest easy with competition like this.There are some interesting supporting performances from other actors, but not enough to hang a whole movie on. The cinematography is good-looking, doing a fine job of capturing the Nordic cold. Even the Sahara winds up looking cold. Perhaps Hamilton carries his own climate with him.There are some individual good action sequences here. Unfortunately, the only sense of humor on screen belongs to the villain, which turns the hero into a big pill. James Bond's jokes may not be particularly good, but at least he doesn't look constipated all the time.One positive point in the movie's favor is that the psychotic, contorted, vicious hatred of Israel in Guillou's books has been left out. What has been kept in is worship of a noble, heroic PLO, that he shows us functioning in Libya without the dictator Khaddafi's knowledge or supervision. This fantasy is hard to believe, since Khaddafi actually threw the PLO out of Libya for four years at a time. And at the end of the film, Hamilton gives the PLO a very disturbing gift. Where will they use that gift? Hamilton doesn't care.We're a long, long way away from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" here.Commander Hamilton will remain a local phenomenon. While Henning Mankell's books sell well around the world, Jan Guillou will never have the same success.As for this film, bleeeeaaahhhhh.

Yes. It takes a Norwegian to ruin and slaughter two great books and a concept that would work well on film - this film truly is The Worst Swedish Film Of All Time. I hated it so badly that I even considered walking out on it, something I have never done. But it was so awful i was almost compelling. I just had to sit through to the end. Much like some early-80's Stallone action reel, this one REALLY takes Swedish action back to the stone-age. So full of logical errors and stupid mistakes it is almost amusing - but who could ever see anything good in the terrible acting, Mark Hamill's surviving a mine-field or the dumb-ass, useless and irrational action?Let me ask you: aren't we through with clocks ticking down to zero, the hero escaping in the nick of time and two friends become enemies reuniting by the end? STUPID!!!!And one more thing: the product placement in this film is unbelievable. While other countries have understood that it shouldn't be so OBVIOUS, the Swedish film industry apparently hasn't understood at all: just look at the credit card Hamilton uses to open a window? Or or or.... this film really makes me mad.

Although 'Hamilton' is a rather good action movie it does lack the interesting details from the original books; "Ingenmansland" and "Den Enda Segern". The books don't include all the action in the movie. The action-sequences in the books are actually only a very small fraction of the whole story. The movie actually differs so much from the books that it will be hard to make more movies from the Hamilton book series...

I think this movie shows a positive development in the movie industry in Scandinavia. It`s a brilliant action-film, with many elements that Hollywood wouldn`t accept (read: chainsaw-scenes). Peter Stormare is excellent and the best of the Hamiltons` that have appeared on celluloid. It has many different scenes and locations from Morocco to the Russian tundra and is a multi-international adventure. Jan Guillou is a very good writer and this is a fine product of two of his books (Ingenmans land and Sista Segern). See it, and make up your own mind.