Underverden

In Copenhagen, the Iraqi surgeon Dr. Zaid (Dar Salim) lives a comfortable life with his pregnant wife Stine (Stine Fischer Christensen) in a fancy apartment. One night, while celebrating with friends the near end of the pregnancy period, his twenty-year old junkie brother Yasin (Anis Alobaidi) surprisingly arrives and asks for a large amount of money. Zaid refuses and soon Yasin is found beaten to death. Feeling guilty for the death of Yasin, Zaid goes to the precinct and finds belittle efforts from the detective in charge of investigating the murder case. Soon Zaid, who is black belt in kickboxing, returns to the training in the garage of a friend. He wears black, paints his motorcycle black and drives during the night through the underworld of Copenhagen seeking revenge for his brother. But he pays a high cost for his acts.

"Underverden", a.k.a. "Darkland", is a Danish action-thriller with a reasonable story of revenge but very entertaining like most films of this genre. The plot has good points, showing the dark side of Copenhagen, and the muslin community. But it is hard to believe that a surgeon with solid career and marriage throw thirty years of life in Denmark away to revenge the death of his junkie brother and with his family, friends and himself paying such high cost. Anyway, it is worthwhile watching this film. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Guerreiro da Escuridão" ("Darkness Warrior")

Nice camera work shot beautifully on a Danish setting, cold, wet and dreary weather condition in blueish sharp tint. With such nice cinematography, the movie is supposed to be very good, but regretfully, the lousy script with poor directing sequences from the very beginning has narrowed the film into a mediocre predictable one-way street.

The heavily flawed screenplay and its storyline could be spotted a mile away from the very beginning within 5 minutes:

1) A prearranged traffic accident on a crossroad, with two cars collided and crashed in a city center was pretty good trick to divert everybody to focus on the accident, allowing the bank robbery to be carried out without anybody on the street paying attention; a good touch here but simply failed to justify a robbery with only one carry-on bag, even its full of money, it might be able to cover the values of two crashed cars. Or, did that car crash get nothing to do with the bank robbery but an unpredictable real traffic accident?

2) Robbing a bank with a bright shinny orange-red carry-on bag? How stupid it could be?

3) The robber, the younger brother of a medical doctor, ran away from the bank on a motorbike through a city sidewalk, how stupid it was! Then out of the blue, a police cruiser suddenly appeared from nowhere and started to chase him with no sirens blasted loudly. WTF?! Was the money he robbed and stuffed into his bag had some micro electronic GPS device that could alert the police to follow him with such ease? What a stupid lousy script, absolutely ridiculous!

If a film started with such a stupid and illogic beginning, from the first scene to the next couple of minutes' development, it was doomed, like a still-born child, no breath, no burst of a first cry, eyes totally shut, no body heat, and this film was dead as a still-born from the very beginning.

I don't think what I write here got anything to do with "Sproiler" at all, because what I point out here is just at the beginning of this mediocre film, badly scripted and blindly directed.

In the intro, a guy talks another into robbing a bank. Just the robber is about to walk into the bank there's a car crash. Never mind. He goes ahead with the robbery. Cops show up and chase him. We don't know what happens next.

An Iraqi heart surgeon in Denmark is told that his brother has just been wheeled into the morgue. It's the bank robber. Now the good doctor starts investigating since the cops can't do much. It's not like the bad guys will volunteer any info. The doc is befriended by some low-level thug who tells him that his brother worked for some drug dealer named Branco. Doc pays him a visit and gets beat up and nearly shot. So he does the logical thing--start working out, train boxing, injecting some substance while he continues to investigate who the killer of his brother is, never mind that his Danish wife is heavily pregnant.

He does find out who is behind the murder, some guy name Semion who surprise...surprise runs some MMA fight club. As the doc plans his revenge, things don't quite turn out as smoothly as planned but eventually he confronts Branco and then Semion.

Darkland is one long, slow, overstylized...action thriller I guess, where the tedious pace completely annuls the action and the thrills. But for an European/Scandinavian movie this is fast-paced and action-packed. I didn't buy for a second the good doc's transformation into Rocky, Rambo and the Energizer bunny. Neither did I sympathize with this guy at any moment. As usual, the bad guys are far more charismatic than this lame bad hero. Direction isn't all that good, it is what gets in the way of the story's potential. While not original, the story isn't bad. But they could have done more with the whole Muslim minority in Denmark thing. There are 3 interesting things in the script. At some point the Doc has some strong words with his father, he points out that they've lived in Denmark for 30 years but he cares more about Iraq and has done nothing there but sit on the couch, never got a job, and didn't have a clue that the younger son was into bad stuff. Then Semion in turn tells the doc that it is he who has been lifting his community and helping those in need while the Doc fled to the "white world" and cares nothing for his people. The doc tells Branco that having children doesn't make a parent, something that later will turn back on him. But aside from that, things are quite superficial. Darkland could have been so much more but it unfortunately is a failure of a movie.

I'm closer to Thobias on this one.

Sure, it's an easy watch, quick and stylish to a fault, and certainly raises highly pertinent questions about Danish (or any OECD) society.

But I found that the script didn't take anywhere near enough effort to make it plausible. So, here we have this highly integrated professional, Dr Jekyll, with a great marriage. He's consciously walked away from his culture and ethnicity, goes out of his way to abuse his poor old dad for being mentally stuck in Iraq.

Then, on behalf of a loser brother he doesn't even like, he suddenly turns into Mr Hyde on steroids? The only partial explanation we're offered is guilt, but it didn't wash for me.

So this may not be the best thriller to come out of Europe but it is more than a decent attempt. It may have quite a few cliches thrown into the mix/for good measure and you will be able to see where this is going too. Still it is intriguing and very well played. You have a "real" issue and something people can relate to (relative in trouble, brother trying to move on, but still feeling obliged to help and so forth).

So the brother in question is not superman, something that is quite apparent and has to toughen up before he can ... well find a solution to a problem his brother "caused". Again there is not much meat to the story, but if that sounds like something that you can be entertained by, than this movie is for you