Review of Wild Men

 

Billed as a comedy but dark and violent and a bit nasty - a little like Riders of Justice. What is it with Danish comedies? Is the audience in a Danish cinema roaring with laughter at this, or do they just mean a different thing by 'comedy'?

This one features an unhappy man who has left his family to live in the wilds of Norway so that he can reconnect with his proper, natural, manly self...but he's actually not very good at it. Failing to kill anything to eat bigger than a frog, he ends up robbing a petrol station instead, and is then half-hardheartedly pursued by the local police, who are mainly oblivious of a trio of drug smugglers in their neighbourhood. The drug smugglers hit a moose/elk, and one of them runs off with the cash leaving the others for dead, but they aren't, and then they run in to the aspirant wild man.

Lots of violence, and blood, and unhappiness, and almost no laughs at all. Even so I found it quite thoughtful and interesting, though Ruth didn't.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.