Another Round

It seems as if the filmmakers were a little unsure about what they wanted to say, perhaps as an understandable consequence of the tragic events that occurred shortly after filming commenced. One point it does seem rather persistent and insistent about, however, is the idea that women are pretty much just a drag, if not, indeed, antithetical to life lived with a sense that desire is never completely tameable. It all starts to get pretty dreary as things very predictably fall apart, before the shift at the end to say, more or less, that it all wasn’t so bad, might even have been good, and that in any case getting drunk every now and then is really just a way of enthusiastically loving the fact of being alive. And it is indeed somewhat interesting that it ends up by equivocating about, rather than vindicating, the conventional notion that, in the end, the most important thing is family – a vindication one might well have expected. So, all in all, it is a bit of this and a bit of that, or in other words unsure of itself, but at least one does get to see Mads Mikkelsen do an impressive barrel roll.