Review by Nia Edwards-Behi
I jumped at the chance to review Jackpot, marketed heavily as ‘Jo Nesbø’s Jackpot’, having thoroughly enjoyed Headhunters (‘Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters’), both film and book. I’m intending on reading more of Nesbø’s work – I would have already if I wasn’t so slow at reading – given my nascent interest in that massive Scandinavian crime thing that’s so popular at the moment. Naturally, I thought I was in for a film not dissimilar to Headhunters (a story that stands alone from the rest of Nesbø’s body of work), a twisty thriller with an undertone of black humour. What I got was… not quite that. Jackpot seems to want to be a sort of Guy Ritchie crime caper, only with an extra layer of added ‘humour’ that either I didn’t get or didn’t work in translation. This desire to be a Guy Ritchie movie seems to be so strong that the film’s score bizarrely and blatantly rips off Hans Zimmer’s scores for Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films. I found this to be particularly distracting but I suspect this won’t bother most people as much as it bothered me, being that I suspect most people haven’t listened to those two scores quite as much as I have.
The story of the film is quite simple, and entertaining enough. The police find a man beneath the body of a stripper, her colleagues and several men lie dead around him. Oscar (Kyrre Hellum) is the lone survivor of a massive shoot-out, and he must recount his sorry tale of petty crime to the detective tasked with working out just what happened to result in such a bloody massacre. It all begins, when he and his down-and-out friends somehow manage to win 1.7 million betting on horses. An elaborate tale is woven and it leads to a relatively satisfying ending, though the film is neither as funny nor as gory as it seems to wish it was. Ultimately, that’s the problem with it – it’s so very middle-of-the-road that there ends up being very little to actually say about it. Is it well-acted? Well enough. Is it interestingly directed? Not really, but it’s not incompetent. Are the action scenes exciting and gory? Yeah? Kind of? It’s all a bit *meh*. It makes for an entertaining and distracting enough film to watch, though, and doesn’t come wholly unrecommended. Kyrre Hellum’s performance does, importantly, get you onside with Oscar, which very much carries the film. He has some nice interactions with the rest of the cast, most of all with Detective Solør, played with effective bluster and bluff by Henrik Mestad. And heck, if you like the soundtracks to the Sherlock Holmes films (I do!), the music’s quite good too.
I feel I can explain away my fairly ambivalent response to the film, however, and that is that I was expecting something completely different from the film – something that makes it a little unfair to then go on and criticise it for. I was completely suckered by a few glances at a fairly misleading poster (right) way back when the film was in cinemas, and a close association with a novelist. This isn’t a Jo Nesbø adaptation, he came up with the story on which the script is based – but boy that’s a good selling point. My expectations for the film were very much based on the theatrical poster, having seen it a few times on the London Underground. Very much in the same vein as the Headhunters poster, it screamed, to me at least, dark thriller – and all the generic associations with Scandinavian crime dramas to boot. ‘I want to see this film,’ I thought to myself. Having then read Headhunters – itself quite different from the usual Scandinavian crime drama – and enjoyed the film, my preconception of what Jackpot would be like was truly cemented. And, as I’ve laid out, Jackpot was nothing like the film I expected. To what degree this impacted upon my response to it, I can’t be fully sure, but I’d happily wager that it made quite a difference. I look at the DVD cover (above left) and think ‘not interested’, but then again, it’s recently become increasingly clear just how unreliable DVD cover design can be. Having said that, for once, it’s a better representation of the film than the original poster. Whodathunkit.
So, by all means, give Jackpot a go. I imagine it might be a lot of fun if what you’re after is fast-paced, almost-funny petty-crime shenanigans.
Jackpot is out on Region 2 DVD on 7th January, from Metrodome.