Not so easy

The high-stress crime thriller Easy Money comes from Sweden but is only partly Swedish. There are also characters who speak Spanish and Serbian. The director Daniel Espinosa (a Swede of Chilean origin) uses a hyper-kinetic handheld camera like Paul Greenglass in the Bourne movies, but tells a more intimate and realistic story. The characters, like those of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, seem to be violent losers. Instead of the global grandeur of the Bourne stories with its CIA tie-in, these are only international drug dealers. Their deal is foiled. Cops come into the picture several times, but the characters mostly seem at war with each other. The main focus is on an interesting character, handsome and opaque, talented yet doomed, like a good film noir protagonist. He is J.W. (Joel Kinnaman), who charms others but may not much love himself. Easy Money makes some narrative mistakes and it takes the increasingly common action movie risk of starting out fast and rarely stopping for breath, but the tension at times is almost unbearable, and it never lets up. This is a real zinger, less complicated than French thrillers like Guillaume Cantet's Tell No One but with the same freshness, breathing new life into a genre that in Hollywood has gone stale. This won't draw the big audience of the Millennium Trilogy because non-Swedes haven't yet gotten a chance to read the bestselling source novel by still active criminal defense attorney Jens Lapidus, but it's been picked up for US distribution by the canny Harvey Weinstein. Espinosa has made a new international kind of Swedish actioner that's multi-lingual, multi-national, but still Nordic in the way it views more intense cultures with a mix of reserve, envy, and horror. Easy Money also has some of the cold tautness of Berlin School films like Hochhäusler's The City Below or Christian Petzold's Beats Being Dead from the crime trilogy Dreileben. Watching it requires stamina and full attention.

The action takes place in the surprisingly violent multicultural criminal underground of Stockholm. It begins with a bold jailbreak by Latin American Jorge (Matias Varela), who is stopped and brutally beaten by mysterious enemies when handsome blond economics student and part-time driver Johann happens along and saves him by setting off the attackers' car alarm and spooking them. The atmospheric shots and jump-cuts quickly take us into the world of Jorge, J.W., and Serbian Mafia enforcer Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic), who oddly, takes charge of his patient and long-suffering eight-year-old daughter Lovisa (Lea Stojanov) and keeps her with him through the increasingly violent sequence of events.

J.W. rescues Jorge and revives him in the small business school dorm room he uses as a staging area for his schemes to rise in the world. Tall, Nordic and fine-boned, J.W. dresses elegantly and hangs out with rich friends and is catnip to their young women, even if some of the privileged males like "Jet Set Carl" (Christian Hillborg) guess that he's a nobody from an obscure town who lies about his working class parents, pretending they're diplomats. J.W. is drawn into the Arab drug ring Jorge's involved with to get rich, and still keeps a hand in as a part-time driver for hire.

There is a moment when J.W. makes a deal with a rich financier whose bank is failing by offering large sums of cash to be laundered -- and strengthen the bank -- when it seems his fantasy is going to become real, and he's got a rich girlfriend Sophie (Lisa Henni) who's crazy about him, a feeling he does not reciprocate. He has learned how to fake panache, but the trouble is that's not going to give him the stomach for the violent world he's gotten himself into. J.W. is an interesting character to observe and identify with: most of us are neither gangsters nor rich people, more like him, but we're not as tall, dashing and handsome as him, nor are any of the other characters.

Easy Money's occasionally out-of-time jump-cut style (something used also by Joachim Trier of Reprise and Oslo: August 31, whose filmmaking virtuosity might be another influence) is perfect for bringing together the film's opposing groups, but it also leads to a certain disorientation. The drug dealings in general are hastily sketched in and the final drug caper that goes wrong is badly introduced. The various dark, brutal characters J.W. must navigate along with the sympathetic Jorge are sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. Espinosa and his collaborating writers Maria Karlsson, Hassan Loo Sattarvandi, and Fredrik Wikström are a bit repetitious in their back-stories of childhood beatings and over-obvious in their appeals for audience sympathy. They have Jorge wanting to be there for his pregnant sister, Paola (Annika Whittembury), and weepy about leaving his mom Monica Albornoz. The brutal Mrado is given a tacked-on tender streak by saddling him with his daughter Lovisa.

But the Serbs and the Swedish Arabs are certainly convincing. And Kinnaman is consistently interesting, standing apart yet increasingly sucked in, distinctive yet a chameleon and invisible. Snabba cash (the Swedish title) is a fresh and exhilarating watch.

A sequel to this film, which was big box office in Sweden, has already been made there, and there was talk earlier of a US remake starring Zac Efron. Kinnaman is a big star in Sweden and has been in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Safe House (with Denzel Wasington, a less distinctive effort directed by Espinosa), which were made after this; he's also starred in the TV series "The Killing." Snabba cash was released in Sweden January 4, 2010; it went into limited US release July 11, 2012. I wonder if success will have spoiled Espinosa and the sequel Easy Money II will be too confident and slick. This movie has a hungry, experimental quality that may be hard to duplicate. This narrative reminded me of the comic book series "Crime Does Not Pay."

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.