Easy Money 2: Mach sie fertig

Well, the first half hour was rather dull, but then the events started to roll and scenes with with chases and betrayals began. This time, the focus is on other characters, but their reasons and acts were logically motivated (apart from the depiction of the Swedish police who were always long time and several steps behind). The characters are more trivial than in the 1st part, and bringing moments with remorse into the lives of hardened criminals was not very convincing; I liked most Fares Fares as Mahmoud.

The film is okay and if you yourself are okay with seeing a film made in Sweden with only a few Swedes in it, and you avoid of pondering why foreign criminals can act freely without having proper sentences and later being expelled, then you are a right viewer.

The first one was a small sensation. Can Swedes make crime movies, which won't be ridiculed and parodied the week after? Yes, they could.

The same can be said about the sequel. The story is more unlikely this time and there are some more clichés, but the characters are anyway not square. They are hoodlums with complications and there's a well functioning story-telling with passable action scenes.

Not that you believe posh Stockholm being like that and why should you believe it about the subs? But movies like this have their own agenda, for better and for worse. This is for better. Can be watched, if you don't have anything more exciting going on in your own life.

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.

It is not a crime drama that I recommend to the whole family on a sunday - or any day of the week - evening. Nothing hollywoodian in this crime film, it presents Eastern Europe DNA in the story, the plot, the violence is everywhere, every dialogue, shot. I watch it every five or six years and enjoy even more and more each time. The second movie of the trilogy is my favorite, though not necessarily the best of the three. It's a bit hard to find a lead character among the others, and don't expect to find any good guy fighting against villains scheme. So, if you crave for brutal and gritty crime films, this one from Europe is definitely for you.

'Easy Money' was a gripping, albeit conventional, story of an ordinary man dragged into a life of crime. This sequel, while also quite watchable, seems to have less purpose: we're reintroduced to the various characters we met in the first film, and watch their continuing, violent and disastrous efforts to make it rich by dealing in drugs. It's broadly believable if a little exaggerated in tempo: drug gangs wouldn't actually survive if their individual members generally perished at quite this rate, but unlike the first film, there's never any possibility of redemption or escape. The sentimental ending rings a little false given the disregard for human life shown by all participants.