Executive Protection
Executive Protection
| 17 August 2001 (USA)
Executive Protection Trailers

After causing a commotion with his last assignment, Falk has been given a desk job, which hardly agrees with his personality, and he ends up accepting an offer from an old friend to buy into a private investigation agency. Another friend of Falk's, Sven, purchased a business in Estonia, and when local gangsters attempted to pressure him into paying protection money, Sven retained the services of Nikolaus Lehmann, a burly private eye, to throw them off his trail. However, Lehmann does his job all too well, murdering the racketeers, and then threatening Sven and his family. With no where else to turn, Sven asks Falk to help him deal with the crazed Lehmann; Falk agrees, but soon realizes he's dealing with a more dangerous man than he imagined when Lehmann kidnaps Falk's wife Jeanette, and then releases her with a time bomb locked around her neck, demanding that Falk hand over ownership of his detective agency to Lehmann.

Reviews
Bimpen

This is a standard action movie, fairly well kept together, and probably good fun for most people. However, the plot has a fundamental flaw. If you are a nice swedish capitalist (Fröler), family and all, trying to establish your business in Latvia(?), what do you do if you get blackmailed? You might try to get help from a silver-haired, ex-STASI agent (Ohrt) carrying a laptop. You might also think it is worth to give up 20% of your profit in Latvia to this former STASI officer in order to get peace and quiet. The STASI-professional then kills all of the blackmailers in 30 seconds! How do you reason then? "Oh, how horrible, I must immediately leave Latvia and try to get away from my agreement with this dangerous STASI-man"? Not very likely, you can't be that stupid and at the same time a businessman. It's simply impossible.4/10 but could be a 6/10 with a slightly smarter businessman.

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Gabri L

After having been almost physically persuaded to see this movie (I don´t see Swedish movies anymore, they usually put my teeth on edge), I was extremely surprised by "Livvakterna". This and it´s predecessor "Noll Tolerans"(made by the same people, has the same main character) are most probably the only Swedish action thrillers to actually deserve that denomination.An introvert, hard boiled, cop goes to the funeral of his friend´s father, and gets involved in a yarn of extortion, blackmail and murder. The action scenes are realistic, nothing fancy, the characters believable, and most of all, the cinematography is excellent. A car chase through a Swedish forest will go down in history as a modern classic, and the director made good use of cut and sound to highten the suspence. And believe me, towards the end I found myself biting my fingernails to the quick!All in all, the best in its genre to come out of Sweden in a long time, and I hope that this movie sets a standard!

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norsted

As the former writer said, it´s a rather good action-thriller. The best one I have seen on Swedish cinemas anyway. Go see it!

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AKS-6

A Swedish action flick that actually works? Is that possible? Well, this movie _almost_ works. While the last twenty minutes or so of Livvakterna are very suspenseful and full of action, the 1.5 hours leading up to those minutes are merely okay. The scene where Krister Henriksson's character explains the first, second, and third crime waves is actually incredibly bad, almost embarrassing to have to watch. The acting? For the most part the acting is better than one might expect from an ordinary action movie, but some performances are not very good at all. However, Livvakterna is rather entertaining, and the last twenty minutes are quite good so I'll give this film a 5 out of 10. If you ask me, I'd say that the director's first movie -- Noll tolerans -- was better than this one.

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