UlfSAndersson

A young man is persuaded by an extraordinary character to quit his boring life after discovering his girlfriend in the act with another man and after getting fired from his job. They both decide to quit for Spain and start a restaurant. What ensues is a quite enjoyable little Swedish/Danish road movie. The acting is quite convincing from the entire cast, especially Tuva Novotny (from the excellent Swedish movie Jalla! Jalla!) and the always superb Ghita Nørby. There is a sadness to the story that is quite interesting, but this does not carry all the way to the end. The plot is not very original, despite the title, and the developments in the movie are quite predictable. Well, there is a nice little twist to it that you may or may not pick up on. Not enough to give it higher than a six rating though.

A very unconvincing cast, including Douglas, delivers an extremely implausible story packed with clichés, with poor cinematography and old-fashioned music. I am usually OK with implausible stories and the original movie is probably good... but for heaven's sake, if you are going to do a remake, at least try to make it feel like the 21st century. The only thing the movie had going for it was a fairly good dialog (probably derived from the original manuscript to Fritz Langs original from 1956), but the lead actor and actress did a pretty poor job delivering them. I almost feel sorry for Douglas, remembering him in excellent movies like Fatal Attraction, Traffic and Falling Down, having to tarnish his good name with movies like this. I cannot for the life of me understand why he agreed to participate in such a B movie. Maybe he needed money (?) or maybe he cannot bear not being in the spotlight, but even so, he should try to make a reasonable effort. This was not up to his usual standards.

This movie is based on the Swedish children's book series called "LasseMajas detective agency" by Martin Widmark. The book series, now running well over ten books, is immensely popular in Sweden and is about two friends, a boy (Lasse) and a girl (Maja), around ten-eleven who are running a detective agency in a quaint make-believe Swedish village called Valleby, where nothing every happens - at least nothing violent. Thus, the friendly police officer in town is completely untrained in his profession, why he often welcomes the assistance of the young detective couple. I am not going to write too much about the plot (why spoil it?), more then to say that someone is out to discredit the police officer...

The manuscript, however, is not based on any of the books and is not written by Martin Widmark. But Sara Heldts original manuscript nicely follows the feeling of the original books. A special note about the cinematography, which nicely captures Helena Willis original illustrations in the book series. The photography is also an important part of why it becomes such a successful adaptation.

I went to see it with my wife and my two sons and we all enjoyed it to varying extent. Of course, my eldest son thought all the "love-stuff", especially the romantic awakening of Lasse, was awfully embarrassing and a waste of time (he is in that age). It is fun, exciting (but not too exciting), romantic (in a very silly way), scary (but not too scary) and simply adorable. My wife is too "grown-up" to admit she liked it, but me and my youngest son both loved it. The acting may not have been too convincing, but there is a surrealistic/fairy tale feeling to the whole movie that excuses a lot of weird behavior and lack of consistency that grown ups tend to get annoyed with.

To sum up, a seven, maybe much for a very predictable little story with implausible characters, but then I am childish and would not mind living in Valleby...