Stockholm Bloodbath

Three stars awarded for the two leads who at least put up a decent performance, but that's about it.

It tries to be a bit Kill Bill, a bit A Knights Tale and epically failing at both. The script is either bad or non-existent. I get the feeling that the director just put up a series of half assed improv-sketches in costumes and cut them together to resemble a movie. I am struggling to see a red thread or at least a plan at all behind it all.

Some yelling, some swashbuckling, some more yelling and everything wierdly cut together to a porridge of gore. Thank God Alba August and Sophie Cookson do a good job of killing Danes and being bad ass. With a narrative more focused on them and less on the group of yelling men trying to resemble Danes, this might have been at least watchable.

I had been looking forward to this movie with quite the anticipation and was quite happy to be able to watch it 12/12. However, my excitement was soon squandered.

From the get go we get a Tarantino vibe, the movie resonates Kill-Bill as we get introduced to whom appears to be the protagonist and the antagonists.

Some gallons of blood later the movie turns into a mess between historical, dead serious and embarassing.

I gad such high hopes for this movie but it falls flat because it doesn't know what it wants to be and therefore ends up being the mess that it is.

And the torture drags on. About 150 minutes of where I enjoyed perhaps 20.

This could actually have been great if the aim was a coherent story about one of the most interesting and dramatic events in Nordic history,

Clearly made for a global Generation Z Netflix generation it aims big. It's loud, there's alot of swearing and frequent use of the F-word and the costumes, scale and the vibe is pretty much spot on.

But at the same time it doesn't trust its audience, meaning that danish and swedish actors all speak english, most with an accent. But why? To maximize the potential for it to be a hit when it hits streaming? This is a weird choice for a period piece, Actually it's as cringe as if Hitler spoke english in the epic germanmade movie called 'Der Untergang' ('The Downfall').

But I could forgive all that if I was engaged in the plot. But I wasn't. Imagine that... there's so much they could have done with this. So many directions and opportunites. They just had to stick to one clear narrative. Because one moment it's trying to be Game of Thrones, the next a Shakespearean drama and the next something entirely else.

It was like being served a main course with a steak, a cake and a piece of pineapple on the plate. Each indiviually great tasting it itself, but mixed together....

Well, this movie was... not great, but a bit of a peculiar (using the word "funny" here would give a wrong impression, since the movie is not half as funny as it thinks it is) experience.

Historically, the Stockholm blood-bath was an infamous event where the Danish army and royalty executed a big group of Swedish aristocrats, so (the saying goes) the street were flowing with blood. Mostly, the legacy of this event has been that it is shameful for Denmark to have perpetrated it, and a good reason for Sweden to hate us (I am Danish, you see). However, seen in a modern and progressive light, was it all that bad to kill off a portion of the oppressive elite? Was it really such a slight to the common people of Sweden?

Anyway, when I went into this movie I hadn't read anything about it, other than that it had some Danish actors in it - so I suffered from the misimpression (is that a word?) that it was actually a Danish-produced movie! And since the Danes in it are presented as cartoonishly evil, I thought it was kind of a funny self-satire on the "Danish" film-makers' part. Even though I didn't like the immature vulgarities of it, I thought it was a redeeming feature of the movie. In my defense, I believed the movie to be Danish-produced because this exact style of humor is (sadly) extremely wide-spread in Danish movies.

But then, as the end credits rolled I realized it was a Swedish-produced movie - meaning that the oh-so-good Swedish characters and the oh-so-evil Danish characters were just the usual bunch of clichés found whenever some country makes a movie about their (past or present) enemies. No self-satire; just caricatured and unnuanced finger-pointing at the easy targets. [EDIT: It actually turns out that the movie is a Swedish/Danish co-production, so I guess the self-satire is there after all. Except that the screenwriters are Norwegian, which is kind of hilarious.]

To be honest, whether the movie were Danish or Swedish-produced doesn't change my rating of it. The attempted comedy fell flat in any case (you see, all the Swedish characters were dead serious), and the movie didn't know whether to be a comedy or a historical movie. It was also surprising to me that it was in English, since it concerns Danish and Swedish events, and starring (mostly) Nordic actors. The movie indeed feels made for international streaming; it has many of those hallmarks of sloppy, rushed and mediocre streaming service content.

There are two reasons I'm not rating this movie even lower. The first is the female actors, which were very good and admirable. It's a great shame that they are being disrespected by being forced to be part of a movie more dominated by immature and misogynist male "humor". The Freja character reminded enormously of Miranda Otto's character from Lord of the Rings (Eowyn? Was that her name?), and was a strong character, if perhaps not super-realistic in the historical setting.

The other redeeming feature of the movie is that it does start some thoughts about what happened in the in/famous event, and does make us check it out on Wikipedia, at least. As they say at the beginning of the movie, some of this actually happened.

Mildly entertaining movie, better than many B-grade films. However, the dialogue is modern day, rather than period accurate, which makes it out of place, as is some of the music and dance sequences. There is a lot of strange split screen editing that just doesn't fit. The attempts at humor fall flat, as does the movies attempt to made the female leads into heroic avengers.