Jackpot: Movie Review

Jackpot: Movie Review

Cast: Kyrre Hellum, Mads Ousdal, Henry Mestad, Arthur Berning, Andreas Cappelen

Director: Magnus Martens

Another Scandanavian crime thriller, Jackpot is yet further proof that the Nordic way of looking at life is somewhat skewed.

After a violent shoot out at a porn shop, one survivor, Oscar remains. Surrounded by eight bodies, and the police and clutching a shotgun, Oscar's immediately hauled into the cop shop to be interrogated as to what exactly he knows about the shooting....

However, while the investigating detective Solør is convinced Oscar's guilty, Oscar begins to explain what happened - and how it all came from the winning of a football pool which netted four men over 1.7 million kroner and caused all manner of divisions.

Jackpot is as dark a black humoured story as they come - it's also incredibly amusingly dry throughout.

Oscar's choice of colleagues for the football pool happens to be three ex-cons, Billy, Thor and Dan who are particularly inept at division (a running gag centres on how they're unable to work out exactly how much money each of them will get) but whose propensity for mistrust and paranoia outweighs the benefits of the win.

But there's a very tongue in cheek feel to some of the extreme violence throughout; when one ganglord's killed in the shoot-out, his final words to a co-worker in the porn shop is to plead with him to go and pick up his son. To which, the co-worker asks if he'll need written permission to do that.

It's that kind of off-kilter, slightly left-field view which permeates the slickly produced piece and thanks to a snappy running time, touches of Fargo (think chippers) Jackpot is a twisty, albeit slight shaggy dog story with a fun pay-off that's as pulpy and in keeping with the genre as you'd expect.

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