Guerreiro da Escuridão

To start off: Watch this movie and support the film by going to the cinema to watch it or rent it - you will not be disappointed! I highly recommend catching it in the cinema.

All in all, this is a great movie within the genre of Danish gang related crime films. It has great acting, amazing music and sound effect design, beautiful cinematography and a plot that works on so many levels I would have never expected! What I expected was 'John Wick' meets Danish gangsters, which wouldn't have been bad, but what I got was so much more. This movie manages to establish a truly sensible love/hate relationship through powerful scenes and dialogues and then continues to use this to its advantage. There are hints at many different things in the plot, which are a delight to discover and think about as afterthought.

I would say 10/10, but I am deducting a star for just a few handful of scenes and dialogues that seemed off and got the movie off to a bit of a slow start. Had they not been there, this movie would have been a perfect 10/10 and maybe the best of its kind within the genre from Denmark of all time. It arguably still is.

TLDR; 'Underverden' is a classic revenge movie, as summarized in the plot description, but it is also much, much more than that!

Nice camera work shot beautifully on a Danish setting, cold, wet and dreary weather condition in blueish sharp tint. With such nice cinematography, the movie is supposed to be very good, but regretfully, the lousy script with poor directing sequences from the very beginning has narrowed the film into a mediocre predictable one-way street.

The heavily flawed screenplay and its storyline could be spotted a mile away from the very beginning within 5 minutes:

1) A prearranged traffic accident on a crossroad, with two cars collided and crashed in a city center was pretty good trick to divert everybody to focus on the accident, allowing the bank robbery to be carried out without anybody on the street paying attention; a good touch here but simply failed to justify a robbery with only one carry-on bag, even its full of money, it might be able to cover the values of two crashed cars. Or, did that car crash get nothing to do with the bank robbery but an unpredictable real traffic accident?

2) Robbing a bank with a bright shinny orange-red carry-on bag? How stupid it could be?

3) The robber, the younger brother of a medical doctor, ran away from the bank on a motorbike through a city sidewalk, how stupid it was! Then out of the blue, a police cruiser suddenly appeared from nowhere and started to chase him with no sirens blasted loudly. WTF?! Was the money he robbed and stuffed into his bag had some micro electronic GPS device that could alert the police to follow him with such ease? What a stupid lousy script, absolutely ridiculous!

If a film started with such a stupid and illogic beginning, from the first scene to the next couple of minutes' development, it was doomed, like a still-born child, no breath, no burst of a first cry, eyes totally shut, no body heat, and this film was dead as a still-born from the very beginning.

I don't think what I write here got anything to do with "Sproiler" at all, because what I point out here is just at the beginning of this mediocre film, badly scripted and blindly directed.

THOROUGHLY enjoyed this movie. For me it wasn't about the "predictability" of the film.... nor was it about the "modern-day revenge" theme as indicated by others.

For me it was all about the back-story.... the story behind the apparent tale. oh yeah.... very current... and very valid in today's society....

Darkland follows the rules of a classic Scandinavian thriller. The atmosphere is oppressive thanks to the acting of the main character and due to the fact that most of the scenes take place at night.

The screenplay is pretty straightforward and without any major surprise but there is still a lot of suspense. We are waiting to see what Zaid is going to do next. This movie also raises interesting questions about ethnicity and one's integration into a different country and culture.

I'm closer to Thobias on this one.

Sure, it's an easy watch, quick and stylish to a fault, and certainly raises highly pertinent questions about Danish (or any OECD) society.

But I found that the script didn't take anywhere near enough effort to make it plausible. So, here we have this highly integrated professional, Dr Jekyll, with a great marriage. He's consciously walked away from his culture and ethnicity, goes out of his way to abuse his poor old dad for being mentally stuck in Iraq.

Then, on behalf of a loser brother he doesn't even like, he suddenly turns into Mr Hyde on steroids? The only partial explanation we're offered is guilt, but it didn't wash for me.