Director: Anders Thomas Jensen
Stars: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mads Mikkelsen, Lars Brygmann
Riding the wave of praise that met his crowd-pleasing Riders of Justice, veteran screenwriter and Oscar winner Anders Thomas Jensen doubles down for his follow-up The Last Viking, reuniting many of the same stable of actors in an effort to do for trauma what his last did for grief. Unfortunately on this occasion his mixture is all out of whack, reliant on some lowest-common-denominator laughs which butt up against his penchant for cruel violence and syrupy sentimentality. As a binding agent this last doesn’t hold, and each element feels ladled on far too thick.
Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is a preternaturally aggressive man just released from a 15 year stint for armed robbery in which a man was killed. He returns to the ailing family he hailed from, principally to seek out his stolen fortune of 41.2m kroner that his neurodivergent brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) has dutifully buried out at the old family homestead. Anker is aghast to discover that Manfred – diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder – now identifies as John Lennon. Yes, that John Lennon. His keenness to evade any threatening situation by hurling himself from windows or out of moving cars is played strictly for laughs. His jags of manic self-harm slightly less so.
Exploiting his brother, Anker drives John out to the rural property that was the source of their shared childhood trauma – flashbacks of grim abuse by their father presented in a leering fashion – but not before going on a bender with John’s psychotherapist Lothar (Lars Brygmann), an eccentric who comes upon the cute notion of familiarising John by uniting him with other dissociatives who believe themselves to be the remaining Beatles. When all and sundry show up, Anker’s patience is tested to it’s limits, and that’s without the added suspicion and chaos conjured by the new owners of the property, mismatched couple Margrethe (Sofie Gråbøl) and Werner (Søren Malling), or the casual brutality wrought by Anker’s old acquaintance Flemming (Nicolas Bro), who is also after the money.
Riders for Justice managed to entwine disparate tonal threads with only a few conspicuous wobbles. Even though it telegraphed where it was headed, the movie managed to compliment dark humour with emotional heft. The Last Viking finds no such sense of balance. Jensen relies too much on old and disappointing routines that exploit John and his contemporaries, cajoling the audience to laugh at the weirdos, presenting anyone outside of our preconceived norms as either quirky gawping fodder or cumbersome obligations. Anker – the exceedingly unlikable supposed straight man – is just as ‘damaged’, but his anger mismanagement isn’t played for the same laughs because he’s better at presenting a socially acceptable front, so he’s resoundingly let off the hook. Jensen tilts toward some notion of a redemptive arc for Anker – that he’ll see the value of his deeply damaged family after all – but it doesn’t convince, and the ending leaves us wondering if he still bolted out of self-serving greed.
Lothar’s early mandate that “everyone’s entitled to their own unique reality” becomes something of a misleading sentiment, negated by the man’s own circumspect integrity and ultimately disowned by the film at large. There’s acceptance of a kind, but at what cost? The escalating violence of the third act is too gratuitous, too mean-spirited, and ultimately gives the impression of a sadistic mind (one female character is bludgeoned for the sake of a punchline about her looks in comparison to her husband’s). The whole thing ends on a sour note that mocks notions of equality, and I came away unsure of what Jensen actually does believe in, or even wanted to communicate.
But what do I know? The audience I saw this with lapped it up and even applauded when the end credits came, while I sat there baffled, wondering if we’d just watched the same film. The Last Viking plays like a stand-up comedian happy to punch-down because it’ll infuriate some imagined “woke brigade”, evidencing a clear misunderstanding of what “woke” even meant in the first place. Treating everything and everyone with equal contempt isn’t better, it’s just nastier, and The Last Viking is a nasty film, and more than that a tiring one.
The Lost Highway Hotel 