You can see the unusually fast Swedish newcomer Joel Kinnaman in this week’s RoboCop remake, or, if you’d like a better sense of him beyond the Daft Punk mask, in 2010’s Easy Money, his breakthrough. In the latter, he’s a schemer straddling two identities—one rich, one poor—in Stockholm. He falls into the drug trade to maintain appearances with his cute girlfriend and some well-heeled connections. The film has an economy of style (and an abundance of lying) that makes it feel special, for all the clichés.
This sequel, from a different director, has the same polyglot vibe (the Serbian underworld figures prominently) and revels in a density of illegal dealings engineered by unusually sympathetic hoods. But something got lost in the expansion. The first movie’s Jorge (Matias Varela), a Chilean drug dealer, is still at large, but into even shadier crimes that lead to an unlikely bond with a prostitute. Elsewhere, too many characters contribute to a dulling of the cross-cultural spark found in the original (and in the better-known A Prophet). Kinnaman doesn’t have as much to play with this time—without his double life, he’s just an unsmooth criminal.
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