CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Keith Edwards 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.

wolw The good news is that most English speaking haven't read the books, which are extremely good, I've re read them more than five times. And here lies the problem..... Since I've read the books I know the plot, which somehow only pops up here and there in the movie making you sit and ask WTF are they doing that for ? This movie is a follow up on the first book/movie and have almost nothing to do with the second book. This review goes for the first movie as well. Worth watching (goes for both movies) if you haven't read the books, stay away from them if you did (goes for both movies), it will only make you confused and angry.Buy the books instead!

Niklas Pivic 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.

David Eastman 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.