Am I Missing Something?

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

A film that starts hilariously funny, with some fabulous lines between Kyrre Hellum and Henrik Mested( the picks of the cast) and though it quite never maintains that level, it sustains enough interest through the various bloody twists of its one hour 25 duration( this feels about the right running time).

Black humor with sort of a happy black ending, which is about as close to a spoiler as I want to get. It's an odd grim movie that starts out really strong and compelling, and while it loses steam as it moves along, it still manages to keep you guessing until the end. It's a bit bloody in parts, but nothing, I'm afraid, that's too terribly shocking to a modern audience. While this film seems to be assembled from parts of a bunch of different movies ("Very Bad Things", among many others, comes immediately to mind), the end result is reasonably original.Scandinavians do dark stuff better than anyone else for some reason- -must be the whole Arctic Circle thing or something. Nobody in this film is particularly likable, but it is different enough from American movies and has an excellent foreign ensemble cast, so it's a nice change of pace. I mean, jeesh it's only 85 minutes long, so you don't have a real big commitment here. Just shut it off, if it doesn't hold your attention, but my guess is that it will, although it's another film that may leave you feeling a bit dirty at the end, which seems to be becoming quite common. That might accurately reflect the world we are living in.

Based on a story by renowned crime writer Jo Nesbø, Jackpot stars Kyrre Hellum as Oscar, who awakes clutching a shotgun on the floor of a strip joint strewn with dead bodies and swarming with police officers. Taken for questioning by hard-nosed cop Solør (Henrik Mestad), Oscar recounts the unlikely events leading up to this point, starting with him winning a share of a 1.7m krone prize in a betting pool. But is Oscar telling the truth or spinning a wild yarn?This was a blind buy from Poundland, and while I wouldn't exactly say that I hit the jackpot with my gamble, I don't regret spending my hard-earned cash on the DVD (all £1 of it!). Director Magnus Martens handles the darkly humorous tale of crime, treachery and murder with confidence, his cast put in solid performances, and there is plenty of grisly violence to keep fans of gritty crime capers satisfied for the duration. Where the film falls down slightly is in its narrative, which, despite plenty of twists and turns, isn't quite as clever or as deranged as it is clearly intended to be—certainly not on a par with the absurdist work of The Coen Brothers, as the DVD cover states.6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

Headhunters has a lot to answer for. It was an exceptional thriller and one that I will definitely buy on DVD. On the other hand it was responsible for directing my steps to the theatre showing Jackpot, om the seemingly logical but ultimately foolish grounds that Norway was emerging as a new source of top-flight thrillers. In my dreams. This is a thriller that thinks it's a Black Comedy then decides it is a thriller after all and winds up being neither. For reasons best known to the author a non-criminal becomes the fourth man in a football pool syndicate and, charged with filling in the coupon to their instructions, changes one of the fixtures which results in 12 out of 12 correct forecasts and nets them a jackpot. Whilst he is out buying beer to celebrate two of the other three kill the third partner. The fourth man returns - the killing occurs in his apartment - and is more or less obliged to watch as the other two behead the corpse. Eventually - don't ask - they drive to a local strip club where one of the two assassins owes the owner a considerable sum. There follows a Mexican stand-off with no less than three guns pointing at various protagonists. Whilst this is going on a group of young men arrive in search of (their words) pussy and are blown away; the police arrive to find the non-criminal clutching a rifle, surrounded by stiffs and lying beneath an obese woman. From there it goes downhill. Don't say I didn't warn you.