The Last Viking review – Mads Mikkelsen thinks he’s John Lennon in von Trier’s spoof comedy | film

AEnders Thomas Jensen is a screenwriter, director and Oscar-winning 95-year Dogme veteran of Zentropa Studios in Denmark. Now he brings us this violently slapstick black comedy and outrageously absurd shaggy dog ​​story. It’s well acted but relentlessly unfunny and bizarre. It’s almost unfunny, but not really, in that the unfunnyness verges on the state of being in itself a joke, though never really reaches it. It’s possible that the ghost of Zentropa’s master of dark pranks, Lars von Trier, is hovering somewhere in the corner of the frame.

Mads Mikkelsen is cast against type as obsessive loser Manfred, an abuse survivor with learning difficulties whose tough-as-nails brother Anker (Nikolaj Le Kaas) robs a bank. Before being arrested, Anker gives poor Manfred the key to the railway station locker where he hid the loot, and tells him to get the money once the cops are gone and bury it in the woods behind their old family home where their father used to brutalize them.

But when he gets out of prison 15 years later, Anker finds that Manfred has retreated into a state of delusion, believing himself to be John Lennon, and is so disturbed by everyone’s disbelief that he cannot remember where he buried the money. So Anker, with the help of a rogue psychiatric nurse, must round up three other dysfunctional cases who variously believe to be Ringo, Paul and George so he can reunite the band in the remote Danish forest for a few numbers, hoping that Manfred will calm down enough to remember where to start digging.

Admittedly, this is a funny premise but it’s tediously executed: I initially laughed at Mikkelsen’s crazy physical comedy before realizing that the film consists of almost nothing but a kind of goofy, humorless violence. Jensen has many skills as a filmmaker, but comedy honestly isn’t one of them. Sofie Gråbøl is doing her best as a martial arts enthusiast who now owns the boys’ family home.