First of all, this really has too little action to be classified as an action film... it should have been labeled 'thriller' instead. Second, I haven't read the book nor have I seen the other version of this film. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, this is pretty much the typical Hollywood-like action B-movie, as well as what the common viewer(well, this common viewer, at least) have come to expect of Danish movies. The bad guys speak English with very see-through accent(some of the dialog even reveals them as Danish... talk about poorly done) despite the fact that they are supposed to be from another country(can't write which here, it would be a spoiler), non-English speaking(well, it wouldn't be their first language, like it is in the movie, anyway). The characters are about as simple and stereotypical as they can be. The main bad guy apparently didn't look mean enough on his own, so they bleached his hair and gave him an awful haircut. The teenagers are about as heroic as they can possibly be. The adult characters in the movie are as helpless as you can imagine for a kids film... wait, what? No, this is an R-rated action-thriller... something must be wrong... ah, of course... it's a Danish film. Seriously, what's wrong with Danish cinema? I have no idea. The plot is tame and unrealistic. The terrorists' motivations are non-existent and nonsensical. The dialog is uncreative. The action is poorly done and lacks any intensity. The direction is all over the place. The acting is so pitifully bad that I felt like threatening the actors at gunpoint with the words "don't you ever, ever set foot on a movie production set again". All in all, the film just isn't really worth watching unless you're in a very good mood, you know a lot about Danish actors and you have high tolerance for crap in celluloid form. Otherwise, avoid this like the plague it is. I give it a medium rating because it's not all poorly shot and it's not as bad as some other films I have seen. 5/10
... View MoreThis teen-oriented action thriller marked stuntman Lasse Spang Olsen´s directing debut, but he fared a lot better with his second movie "I Kina spiser de hunde". Based on a novel by Anders Bodelsen, this has been filmed once before, as "Operasjon Cobra", in 1978. In both movies, a bunch of kids try to foil a terrorist attack, but Ola Solum´s Norwegian version was far superior to this amateurish mishmash. No cliché is avoided, and Olsen´s stuntwork is just as heavy-handed as his direction. *½ (of ****)
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