Hawaii, Oslo

This is a remarkably well constructed movie that is fascinating to watch yet somehow manages to fall flat. The many characters race constantly around Oslo on an atypically scorching summer day (nobody seems to walk there, regardless of the heat and sweat, or to drive slowly) on their various frantic individual quests, briefly intersecting or passing each other unknown and unknowing, until they all come together magically in the end.

As others have already said, there is much in this movie that is derivative of earlier movies, but a good movie does not have to be innovative. However, it does - for me - almost always have to make me care about the characters, and that is what this one failed almost completely to do.

I cared about only one of the dozen or so main characters scurrying and caroming around the city like pinballs, and he was the least frantic, the most unassuming of them all: little Magne, the younger (and quieter) of the younger pair of brothers, played with exquisite, tender understatement by Ferdinand Falsen Hiis.

Magne was like a small but solid rock in this swirling storm of a movie, and it would have been been crushed under the weight of its own overwrought melodrama without him. To use a contrasting metaphor, he is like the gravity that keeps the universe from spinning out into nothingness.

Erik Poppe gets one star for choreographing this frenetic dance, and Ferdinand Falsen Hiis gets four stars for holding it together just by being in it. He makes it worth watching. ALL the adults are just too frenzied to either believe or care about.