The Last Viking
I am contractually obligated (by long-standing fake marriage) to support every new Mads Mikkelsen film by watching it in the cinema, so upon seeing snippets of his face in the Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival package that’s been playing at Luna screenings, I saved his latest film, The Last Viking, in the calendar.
Is this the most attractive Mads has ever looked? No. But my love is unconditional.
It’s also the latest from frequent Mads collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen, director of Danish comedies like The Green Butchers, Adam’s Apples and Riders of Justice and writer of Mads-starring dramas After the Wedding, Open Hearts and The Promised Land. Such a filmography is testament to his tone switching ability, a skill he’s honed from decades in Danish cinema.
I was expecting him to exhibit the same tonal mastery in The Last Viking, especially since it’s an odd couple black comedy about a crook and his brother who has dissociative identity disorder and thinks he’s John Lennon. While the film certainly has moments of hilarity and great darkness, I’m not sure Jensen quite pulls off the blend.
The film is at its best when the two brothers are at their mother’s very witchy looking house in the woods, laying low after Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, another Anders Thomas Jensen collaborator), who has quite literally just been released from prison, goes on a bender and releases Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) from a psych ward. The pair are also on the run from the violent Flemming (Nicholas Bro), whom Anker owes a debt.
The Last Viking struggles to merge its harder elements – like Flemming’s violence, which is particularly targeted at female characters caught in the middle of Anker’s shenanigans – with its lighter, sillier ones. So we can go from seeing a woman punched hard in the face to a bunch of dudes who can barely play instruments dressed in makeshift Sgt. Pepper outfits while practising ABBA songs. It’s not the worst whiplash I’ve ever had but it was a bit disconcerting.
As far as performances go, Mads is entertaining. He’s stifled a bit by the emotional stuntedness of his character but watching him roll out of cars and jump out of windows over being misnamed is a hoot. The real MVP, though, is Sofie Gråbøl as Margrethe, a woman operating under a deeply amusing misinterpretation of her place in the world and who I think brings the most comedy to the piece.
All in all, The Last Viking is fine. It’s not as strong as Riders of Justice as a black comedy and it’s not among the films I’d recommend as essential displays of Mads Mikkelsen but it has its moments and some of them are pretty funny.
☆☆☆
