It almost pains me that this movie could have so easily been an enjoyable piece for a diverse general audience. Alas, it isn't.
Overall, it has quite a good rhythm. There is some great acting at times ('Zeka', 'Mali'), along with some simplistic characterization and chewing the scenery. The fight scenes are sort of OK-ish. The camera most often did a decent work...
For me the movie flopped primarily for a lack of a decently well-developed screenplay and for an overabundance of ill-disguised covert advertising.
The production could have benefitted from a better cooperating screenwriter - director duo, such that would successfully develop and deepen the main character; control, tweak or advance the episodic characters and subplots; take better advantage of both the comedic and tragic elements; and emotionally engage the audience as the plot and inner drama build up to a climax.
Although the first half of the film seemed pretty well made, towards the end of the screening I had a feeling I must have been watching a butchered, ill-edited version of the movie, with the good, more meaningful parts strangely being omitted. (In the words of 'Basta': "Focus!")
Here's a random selection of the things that bothered my movie theatre experience:
The postcard-like location titles (Budapest, Chisinau...), immediately followed by action starting somewhere totally unrelated to the iconic places shown in the intertitles. It is such a minor, totally insignificant thing, I know, but from the start of the film these things kept lowering my expectations.
All the punches in one of the fights sounding almost identical, as if in a cartoon, or a retro combat game.
Soundtrack-wise, the dating scene is made especially awkward, as the use of music almost surgically sets it apart from the previous sequences of the film.
The locker room scene when the protagonist faces his past - this could/should have been written, directed, or post-edited differently, anything that would make it less a bland cliché.
The fast-paced exchange of the title cards 'three days to/till..', 'two days...', 'one day...' seemed like a haphazard filler, until I remembered the two rows of film funders, donors, sponsors, patrons and the like from the start of the film. While the similar footages set in Chisinau more-or-less worked for me, also as an homage to the Rocky steps scene, the rushed Novi Sad sequence as such was again another moment in the film that breaks the cinematic spell. Later on I realized that quite a few scenes that felt more than a bit odd could be explained not as a build up to a future plot development, nor as explanatory hindsight, but simply as an ad.
Given the milieu and the angle they chose to tell the story, the film not surprisingly failed at Bechdel-Wallace test, but as a comedy it also falls short of the six-laughs' test. It inadvertently excelled at the cringeworthy moments test.
It might have worked better as an unpretentious TV movie or miniseries.
