When I attended a screening of EM/HtK, it was poorly attended. That may because of the blizzard that night, or it may have been because a popular on-line site of movie reviews gave it a mere 53% on their Lettuce meter. At the time, their highest rated film was The LEGO Movie, and that, I think, explains this movie's poor reception in the US.It's a famous truism among Hollywood producers that "People don't go to the movies to get depressed," and Americans might've liked this movie more if, after all the mayhem, the female lead and the young desperado had ridden off into the sunset and were last seen walking down a beach at sunset and holding hands.But for those of us who admire realism, not cartoon fantasy, this is an extraordinarily gripping movie. As Europe suffers through the effects of the IMF's austerity penance, unemployment among young people in some nations approaches 50%, and in such circumstances they turn to crime. This is the case not only in Madrid and Athens (and Detroit), but as people migrate north, everywhere, including Stockholm, where this movie is set.Actor Joel Kinnaman's role is diminished from the first movie in the series, and it's also less interesting, but the rest of the cast more than makes up for this.¡ ≥ SPOILER ALERT ≤ ≥ SPOILER ALERT ≤ !If you have not yet seen EM/HtK, please read no further.The only false note in this grim movie is near the end, where the two sympathetic characters, Nadja, the young woman who has been forced into prostitution, and Jorge, the guy who begs his dead mother for forgiveness for all his misdeeds, fall in love but are tragically gunned down by a shotgun-wielding assassin from the mob. Getting blasted by a 12-gauge at point-blank range would, in reality, have left her viscera splattered across the room, and when the guy takes a load of buckshot in the upper back, he miraculously does not go into shock or even cough blood. Instead, as they are wheeled into the ambulance, they smile and make dewy eyes at each other.It's a mawkishly sentimental scene in an otherwise uncompromising movie.

I had really been looking forward this edition, but after 2 minutes into the movie, the director destroyed it all, I went on and continue to watch the movie and had all the time hoped that it would return to the red wire that was trough in the previous movie, But I was disappointed that it never showed up ... When the film premiered here in Sweden, so did all of the newspapers and the media and the people to the sequel was so amazingly good..But I was shocked when I saw the movie, where all these people had their opinions? maybe even one man's opinion influenced separated thousands ...The director who made the movie, I had high hopes in him, but I never thought that he would fail so rough to make a sequel ... He has totally lost the grip from the first movie, which was very realistic ... and he had now dreamed away about how the criminal world looks ..The first scene in the movie is enough ... drug smuggling on a large scale in broad daylight and in a rubber boat on the open water in front of hundreds of people and buildings ..HAHAHA what a joke, you liked the first movie so NOT SEE THIS ... ALL CHARACTERS YOU THOUGHT ABOUT AND LIKED IN THE FIRST MOVIE IS NOW DESTROYED IN THIS SECOND MOVIE ..

Yes, this was actually better than the first part of this trilogy; this film doesn't show a lot of sappy scenes where all trauma lies explained - all childhood related - and the start of the film, where three parallel stories unfurl, is quite exciting. Still, it all dribbles down to one fatal flaw that people like Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa and John Ford realised: if you use simple stereotypes and decide to tread the path that says "all bad guys must go down", you must have a twist on it. Here, there is none, and the film rots from the half to the end, where script, tempo, dialogue, and everything else suffers but lens glares are prioritised. Oh, well.

This little crime genre film rolls along pretty nicely, because it mixes different types of criminals (the weak minded or the desperate) and underlines the strange role that Sweden plays for immigrants.The one thing I always remember about Sweden is that all immigrants hate the Swedes. This story mixes in Arabs, Serbs and even a Mexican. So the crime communities just get on with the job - and indeed Sweden itself is just a back drop here.I didn't see the first film, but the different characters obviously knew each other, but this is only relevant later on. All of them meet some type of nexus because of something going wrong, and have to resort to more crime. Gritty without being unpalatable, we see that crime rarely pays and there is, of course, no easy money.