Omerta 6/12

I usually like most of what comes out of the Norsk/Swede/Finsk movie scene but this was a complete disappointment, almost like it was made in the 1980's for viewers with a limited threshold for entertainment as it seems most of the reviews over a 5 are all one review shills once again

This movie has really bad acting from the main female lead; where do they dig these so called actors from? Presumably following the Hollywood tickbox agenda once again methinks; even the recent Black Crab movie beats this one and it was a bit of a stinker too, even though the fantastic Noomi Rapace headlined it but at least she can act, so it was not a total loss but this one will just waste an hour and a half of your time it was so bland and formulaic with some truly dreadfully bad fight scenes.

Add to this some really boring action scenes and a completely unfathomable ending just makes this movie a complete waste of time!

Where to I start.

Plot-The plot was overly complicated and dubious that I am not sure what was going on, why it was happening, to who it involved and finally not caring anymore.

Stupid villians-One person with a handgun vs six highly trained black ops with high-tech automatic weapons which they already had pointed. Want to guess who won? Yeah, we got those types of scenes.

Who shooting who-At one point the villians and 'police' was dressed the same, so when the shootout started, you could not tell who was being shot. Bad oversight committed by the director.

Subtitles- Either subtitle the entire move, or dub the movie, please pick one. Here the movie was almost 50-50 with dubbing then switching to Finnish, Russian, French and English. It was very confusing expecially if you were not watching the screen every second.

It's funny when people read a good book they immediately think this would make a great movie. This is not a good movie

Lead actor plays the part of no nonsense Finnish tough guy. Which fits Pääkkönen rather well.

Seems that direction and production were too busy dreaming their vacation during the filming so results is a poor Hollywood ripoff.

It is clear that this is made for Finnish audience only with cameos from news readers and other people who very few foreigners know.

This means more for the fans of Ilkka Remes and Finns who might have wished for this to be their own super cop series as Remes has made at least 15 book that continue this story in a alternative Finland with various characters.

This was watchable . . . I guess. There was a lot of filler material with long boring shots that went nowhere. Disparate parts of the plot never crystalized and action scenes tended to be either flat or overblown. I could not tell if part of the movie was filmed in English, or if the English was dubbed in later. I watch everything with subtitles turned on anyway. It's too late for the politics of the plot to be relevant, so I wasn't watching to see that play out. Even so, I expected for a conspiracy to revealed up into the highest realms of the government . . . But in the end, it just all fizzled out.

Although the film started out pretty ok then, at some parts, the acting was really mechanical (e.g. At the beginning I thought the character of Anya was either played by a humanoid robot or was computer simulated... it was eerily caricature... like a glitch in the film, like somebody from a neighouring movie set stopped by, straight out of a bad sci-fi movie...

Anyway, I think what went terribly wrong with this film was that the actors were made to speak a foreign language that most of them weren't particularly good at. Of course it is going to affect their performance! If it's a Finnish film, why not let the actors act in their mother tongue? I think it would have made a world of difference... It's weird if characters from Finland are talking to each other in English... cause IRL they never would. This film was like getting a massage when the masseuse is wearing gloves... kind of there, but, kind of, also NOT.

I think there was only one believable character in the film, that was Titov, the Belarussian mobster/villain (but that actor is also not from Finland), who mastered English with a Russian accent pretty well (but he had an advantage - he didn't have to sound good in English. Also, his acting had kind of a rough street cred, I enjoyed it very much. If it weren't for that character, I'd have given this film 3 stars, no more.

The set that was supposed to be in Tenerife... hmm... I could almost swear I recognized a beach in Estonia... the colour of the sea certainly points to that as well, and an old yellow swing set from Soviet era... maybe also Latvia or Lihtuania... I will eat my hat if it was really Tenerife.

I think that overall, the plot was pretty ok, except for maybe the last quarter of the film (why just tie up all those "loose ends" - so unnecessary). The execution of the film was, like, really bad, however. Mainly, I guess, due to a lot of rushing through the film shoots and a low budget, probably. So, for anyone not from Finland or Estonia or any other countries wherever the actors came from (and therefore would like to cheer on for their fellow courtymen) - please, don't waste your time... there are a million other such action movie-ish thingies out there that are a whole lot better.