Very Cold Trip

An unimaginative guy's booze, boobs and bravado flick. A loafer boyfriend is told by his girlfriend that he needs to get a cablebox so they can watch "Titanic" or she leaves so he and his two similarly goofball, loafer, less-than-responsible buddies drive what is suppose to be a couple of hundred kilometers (the actual times and distances make 10 kilos more likely) looking for a store or some other source that has the cablebox. Essentially the movie showcases the dumb slapstick mistakes they make at a level that would make a juvenile hyped. Made in 2010 and now being released in DVD so that tells you something.

Napapiirin sankarit is an overly hyped Finnish movie that was said to portray a life of Finnish men. Well firstly the main characters in this film are hollow caricatures of the group of people they portray. They are nothing but stupid and live on welfare. That just seems boring and offensive enough and just every aspect of the plot is made clear in the beginning. I only found myself smiling a few times but that doesn't really make a good comedy because the film itself was dragging all the way.

It felt like the film lacked many elements that make it watchable and smooth. Firstly the characters weren't all that interesting, they just were plain stupid. Now that isn't enough for a viewer to actually care about them. Secondly the plot seriously needed more depth to it to make it last for the 90 minutes. Thirdly it seems like the script was written in a day as it isn't that complex. Fourthly the old and used clichés should have been avoided because this film is just full of them.

Lastly, all Finnish movies need some Russian character to misbehave or just remind of the second world war. It's amazing how many clichés can be packed in just one movie.

Of course i understand that in farce comedies everything seems to go wrong but at least it should be funny. I don't know that would i actually need a mindset of a woman to actually find the overall silliness of the men really funny.

One of Dome Karukoski's earlier films and certainly one of his funniest, Lapland Odyssey is essentially a catastrophe road-trip movie. A deadbeat man living in the months long night of Lapland gets an ultimatum from his wife. Either he gets her the digital television adapter he has been promising her for ages, or they're through. And he only has until the morning to do so. The only problem? It's already late evening, he has no car and the nearest all-night electronics store is hundreds of kilometers away.

From that basic setting we end up getting one of the funniest Finnish films I've ever seen. And I think the reason why I found this to be so funny, when Finnish film humour usually does nothing for me, is the fact that the characters take it so seriously. For the man and his two equally deadbeat friends this is truly an odyssey. They're on a quest to save to man's marriage and they will go to extreme lengths to achieve their goal. No winking at the camera, no forced jokes, no pop culture or modern events references. Just great characters and them getting into trouble.

The film is also beautifully shot, well-acted and features some stunning shots of winter Lapland. If I had to name one problem, I'd say that the Finnish stereotypes can be a bit forced from time to time. Oftentimes they're the best source of humour in the film, but from time to time they wander into groan territory. Still, a very minor problem in the grand scheme of things.

Lapland Odyssey is certainly worth a watch for all fans of comedy and for all those that have liked one of Karukoski's other films.

I thought it was going to be a hilarious comedy, Hangover style - with stupid, but believable characters and comprehensible plot. Instead it was a mess to watch. The actions of the morons made no sense. Their personalities were unbelievable. Maybe if they were completely stoned, but they weren't! It wouldn't have mattered much to me if the situations they found themselves in were funny, but I couldn't even laugh at them! I kept waiting and hoping for the film to get better, to resemble the trailer I saw... I should have known better.

Oh, wow. This ending is one of the finest I've ever seen. Absolutely brilliant. The movie Hangover has clearly been riding along when Pekko Pesonen typed this madness down. His scenes are seriously over you, like a group of killer bikini chicks. Very nice. At first I thought I had walked into an exhausting exercise in endurance of sole stupidity, but then I realized my mistake. These buddies are in fact in a confused state of mind due to unemployment. Hence mentally crippled and do the best they can. This is a very unfortunate clarity blunder, but otherwise director Dome Karukoski's movie is a master class in consistency. Much thanks to Jussi Vatanen's believable laid back style.