Uro

I like the premise of this movie. The undercover squad's "actor" with his troubled past getting in over his head and having to make some hard choices. It's not ground breaking, but it's enough for an interesting story. His relationship with his mother is at times interesting, and we learn about his father works too.

Sadly it all falls apart when the main character, Hans Petter, keeps making really dumb choices for no apparent reason. At some point you just have to assume it's because of his troubled past (or "something like that"), but then it makes to sense he would get to where he is. He could have easily avoided lots of trouble by thinking things through just a little bit, and that makes it frustrating to watch.

I'm not expert in how they speak (spoke) in the Oslo drug scene, but I had a hard time believing some of the lines spoken by the actors.

All though this story is interesting in itself, the underlying emotional aspect is not given enough weight. Unfortunately the script is not good enough to make us understand, or at least care, about HP's bad and confusing choices during this 104 minutes. He makes weird and stupid decisions over and over again and it is just irritating...! The inter-human relations in this story are in addition badly reproduced. HP and Makker, HP and Mette, HP and Marco, HP and his dead father... We don't get the feeling that he is close to any of them, and yet their relation is supposed to mean more than what the film is able to express. Another thing that is weird, are scenes where people start shouting to each other without any obvious reason... People can get "caught in the moment" and engaged in a discussion of course, but two men yelling at each other in a block-apartment still seems weird when you see it on-screen. Difficult to explain, it just seemed a bit... "off". The action scenes is not at all bad. Norwegian film is definitely improving on this aspect. Nicolai Cleve Broch is a great actor, and he is convincing in his role as HP, but his character is not nuanced enough. I blame the script, cause he has already proved that he can manage this ambivalence in "Uno". Ane Dahl Torp is okay as Mette, but doesn't give much extra to the film. Ahmed Zeyan as Marco is also okay, but none of them "blows me away". Ingar Helge Gimle as "Makker" is all wrong!

With such a strong movie with this kind of a powerful cast and story, it's hard to believe the very mixed reviews and the misleading points given so far at IMDb.

I truly believe that this is one of the strongest Norwegian movies in years, following other great movies of 2006 with ease. It's not a noisy kind of cop movie, but a movie that's about the choices we are given in life and whether they are choices or not. Can you escape your past and your family's legacy? Nicolai Cleve Broch are both strong and fragile in a very low key way, and the troubled Ane Dahl Torp finally shows why she became a shooting star last year. Bjørn Floberg are as terrifying as ever, and Ingar Håkon Gimle once again shows his versatility.

You can't miss this one.

I recently saw this at the 2007 Palm Springs International Film Festival. The story is by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg who previously wrote the internationally popular film Hawaii, Oslo. This crime drama out of Norway is about a rouge undercover cop comes from a home who's mother is an alcoholic and father has committed suicide but with determination to make something out of himself he has recently graduated from the police academy and has gone into the URO narcotics unit as a rookie working undercover. His failure to follow rules of procedure and his aggressive tactics bring him scorn and punishment from within his department. He also finds himself in the drug dealing underworld of a friend he's known since childhood. It's a good premise for a crime drama and the story moves along well with interesting characters but it's a little far-fetched and simplistic too. Nicolai Cleve Broch stars. A fairly impressive debut feature film by it's director Stefan Faldbakken. It's worth checking out and I would give it a 7.5 out of 10.