The Worst Film Ever

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Best movie ever!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I like watching bank robbery films and there are a lot of good ones out there, Charley Varrick and Dog Day Afternoon being two of the absolute best, so I was looking forward to this. But it has to be right at the other end of the scale. Somehow, the film makers have managed to pull off the near impossible, by making the biggest heist in Norwegian history boring. I can't think of a single interesting thing to say about this film. The perpetual on-screen captions telling us things like "five minutes earlier" add annoying to the formula. It's also completely devoid of humour. ***SPOILERS***Questions I'd like to ask Norwegians; are the police really that bumbling and disorganised? How can the town's whole police force be blocked in their station by a burning lorry? It just seems ridiculous. A question for the robbers; why did you ever think the glass would break so easily? The stupidity and lack of depth in the characters ruins any attempts to be realistic. A complete waste of time.

I consider myself a die hard heist movie lover, and this film is, for me, one of the best ever made. And I know what I am talking about. I have watched thousand of them in my life, since the early seventies. This movie is based on actual events. It's a sort of mixup between semi documentary and classic film. The tale of a large group of professional robbers fully equipped as a SWAT team, who pull a mammoth bank heist right in the middle of a major town. I was astonished by the pace, filming, editing and acting of this fantastic action, thriller and crime flick. Of course, there is not study of characters here. But I don't care. You're literally stuck to your seat from the beginning to the very end. A very realistc story, that the Hollywood studios would not have made in such a way. Maybe not worse, but just different...I put it at the same scale as HEAT.I am also surprised that the robbers did not use explosives to blast the bulletproof bank window, or the vault armored fence, that prevented them to take the tons of bank notes we saw at the beginning of the films, with the bank clerks talking about their private lives just around, as if they were in a bakery...

This movie will not necessarily disappoint, but probably surprise those expecting a traditional movie with a plot and character progression etc. Nokas has none of that. Instead this is an extremely detailed reenactment of the robbery, based on witness statements, security camera footage and interviews with police officers and even some of the robbers.The movie begins with the gang getting dressed and ready to go, and ends with them taking off with the money. Everything in between is basically the big heist scene from the movie Heat, Norwegian style, for 80 minutes.To understand why anyone would make a movie like this, you'd probably have to be Norwegian. And what I mean by that is that Norway is a very small country where bank robberies of any kind are very uncommon. Needless to say a robbery of this magnitude resulted in an absurd media circus which literally lasted for years. All the robbers became household names and some even got their own "super villain" nicknames, such as "The Shadow" and "The Master Brain". The general fascination only grew as the leader of the gang, while hiding from the police, supposedly ordered the armed robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo where two of the world's most famous paintings, Scream and Madonna where stolen in order to force the police to shift focus.Anyway, the movie is great. And what makes it so is the authenticity and the fact that this is what really happened. Normally when movies are based on real events, we get the directors own interpretation of what "might" have happened, often an interpretation full of nonsense and "liberties with the truth" in order to make it work as a movie. But no, this is it. This is as close to a real robbery you'll ever get on the screen. Even small details such as certain gestures, which can be seen in the real security footage, have been carefully duplicated. This makes for an extremely tense ride which will surely keep anyone interested in heist movies on the edge of their seat all the way through.It's also quite chocking to see exactly how the police engaged the heavily armed robbers in a fierce firefight, in the middle of a town with hundreds of civilians in the area. How they continued to provoke the robbers even after hostages was taken, and finally how it all resulted in the death of a police officer. After watching the movie it seems as an even greater miracle that no one else got killed. Hopefully the Norwegian police have learned exactly why robbers carry heavy firearms. "The Master Brain" even explains it in the beginning of the movie when he says something like: "If the police shows up, just pad your weapons and show them we're the strongest. They won't engage". Well, they did. And it didn't end well.

While coherently depicting the original story of the 2004 robbery of this bank in Stavanger, Norway, I have to advise people that I have been motion sick for almost all the film. The camera is mostly behind an actors shoulder, with focus on the shoulder but in many scenes not on what it actually looks at. This, combined with a lot of hand-held filming, made me feel very sick from watching it. The otherwise very fluently and grippingly told story is lacking some overview shots, and as with so many films these days the camera is very very close to the actors, which in combination with the fast editing can lead to a certain disorientation. The ending scenes do benefit from the absence of all this, and rest burned into memory long after the film ends.