Chain of Fools

i am an ardent fan of traktor... or at least fan of certain elements in traktor and was sadly disappointed by the film. the storyline was not the ingenious silliness one expects from traktor's work. i'd love to make some specific comments, but i began nodding out after jeff goldblum was left in the ex's apartment. sorry, but i cannot recommend this one... not even to my little brother.

I found this movie 4 years ago on Italian pay-TV, it was very less advertised and I've seen it only because that night there wasn't nothing apart it, and it was with famous actors like Steve Zahn and Salma Hayek. And when it started, I read the others actors of the cast! One name better than the previous: Jeff Goldblum, Elijah Wood, Orlando Jones, Tom Wilkinson, David Cross. This is a good point to start watching a unknown movie: discover a beautiful cast. Then, the movie, obviously. I love black comedy and generally all the movie with a lot of different characters which want the same thing(s), like Snatch, Big Trouble… And this one is absolutely the best. It's very funny, which is a very hard thing to find nowadays, few times banal, and it has a tremendous pace (in 1 hour and 35 minutes happens everything you can imagine). Moreover the plot begin almost at the end of the history, and then it's a flashback followed by another flashback, and so for all the actors, but, that is the best thing about this movie, it's never really hard to figure out and, although it is complex, it's easy to rebuild the history, which is globally believable. It's quite clean (not like the majority of black comedies), unfortunately it has a large number of dirty words (in the Italian version I've counted more of 70 of them), but they are proportionate at the characters. So, isn't a deep movie to think about something, it's the better way to relax yourself sometimes. Discover it, because isn't famous at all!

Robert Bollingsworth's dying words are "Where is the moose?" (or, possibly, "When will the moose come?"), which must be an inside joke for the Swedish audience from the two (Swedish) directors. Supposedly, the elderly Swedish king, Gustav V, (the present king's great grandfather) once fell asleep in church during a lengthy sermon. Suddenly, the king awoke, and believing he was on a moose hunt, he asked aloud "När kommer älgen?", which literally translates into "When does the moose come?". The phrase has been used e.g., by the Swedish comedians "Hasse & Tage", Hans Alfredsson and Tage Danielsson, in one of their stage productions, where Tage Danielsson played Gustav V.

This started off a little slow, but quickly accelerated to a very quick pace. It went so fast for the last two thirds of the movie that you really had to pay attention to get everything. The twists are great, and incredibly funny. The plot is pretty good, not brilliant but allows for some very funny twists, and some unbelievably funny, but fairly unlikely, very complicated, situations that will make you laugh for several minutes without stopping for a breath, provided that you like black humor. The actors all do pretty good jobs, even Elijah Wood, who I normally hate with a passion, pulled off an entertaining performance. There weren't really any of the actors I was heavily disappointed by. All of the characters were funny, in their own, twisted sort of way, most of them are either caricatures or stereotypes, but they work really well together. The humor was great, most of the time, though some of the jokes fell flat, but most of it was a treat for fans of black comedy(like me). The sparse number of action scenes there was, were really great. The movie has a very good fast pace throughout most of the movie, there was hardly any moment where I was bored. The movie has some scenes that take place on a non-linear timeline, especially in the beginning, but the moment these are over, the film finds a better pace. This is not to say that these scenes were bad, in fact I find them to be a great start to the film. Overall, the movie was quite good, but some of the humor seemed to be more there to shock than to amuse, some of it did seem over the top. It could have been better, had the humor been more balanced and had more of the characters been believable and likable. In the end, the movie has some great laughs, but that's about it. It's easily forgettable. I recommend this to pretty much any fan of black comedy. It's not the best, but it's a pretty good one. If you're not easily offended, and you like black humor, it's worth checking out. 7/10

Ok, well, this wasn't a masterpiece or a greater work of art. But it sure was a very funny movie. A movie, which, given the right release, could have been a hit. It's a good script, a very hilarious one. The premise is nothing new. Just the story of a normal guy who, agains't his own will, get thrown into a bunch of impossible situations. I'll give this movie a 7. A perfect movie to watch with a bunch of friends. The only problem is finding it.