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This movie is another drama that is hard to stomach, even though it opens as a rather light movie about a cheese salesman who comes to the big town, Belgrade. He is befriended by a waiter/bar owner who picks him up and gives him a lift, played by the great Bogdan Diklic. Salesman, played very well by Enver Petrovci, is a rather naive and good-natured man who is divorced and has a daughter. He is therefore a rather lonely guy with not much to lose, something that in the end brings forth a violent and tragic ending. Diklic takes him to the bar which he owns and at first treats him well, introducing him to the local deadbeats who frequent the bar. They include a middle-aged cynical woman and some rather despicable men, including the old timer played by Predrag Lakovic.

Poor cheese salesman is soon made a target of several jokes, including a prank someone plays on him where two hookers act like they are interested in him, but the salesman is embarrassed by it all. He claims he doesn't know them, innocently, while even the bar owner Diklic tells him to "give them one on his tab". Diklic starts to join the harassing of Pantic (Petrovci) and in the end he goes totally berserk, claiming he ordered a lot more than he really did and demands him to pay for it. The gang also eats the entire pot of cheese that Pantic was supposed to sell at the market, leaving him without a way to earn money. In the end, he cannot take it any more and explodes violently.

This is a very dark and cruel film which shows what can happen to an unsuspecting man from the countryside in a big and mean city like Belgrade. The bar is like hell. It is frequented only by low-life losers and perverts, including two aging men who are accompanied by a whore. This movie also shows what peer pressure is and that even people who are not that bad inside can get drawn into bullying an innocent guy. Diklic's character is like a two-faced man. At first he helps Pantic and treats him like a friend and then he completely changes face and starts to treat him badly, like a drunken and unwelcome guest. This is Serbia at its grimmest and meanest. The lesson? Don't accept offers from people you don't know in a big city, unless it is only for a lift. Petrovci's character accepts more than that and in the end has to pay.

The movie is titled after a song which the two men with the prostitute start to sing and as the entire bar joins in, things escalate into a violent finale. It is called "Carrot, you don't grow fine".

This is a review concerning the segment "Sargarepo ti ne rastes lepo".

This movie is full of tragedy, yet also redemption. It is a story about one young boy who ends up in the wrong crowd. It is 1983 and Shaun is a 12-yearold boy whose father was killed a year ago in the Falklands War. Worth noting is the choice of year, as it was a time of major political and social upheaval in Britain. Miner strikes and dissatisfaction with Thatcher's regime. It is this dissatisfaction that also is shown here, albeit from a very extreme perspective of the skinhead leader Combo. Combo is a character full of contradictions, as he is both a racist and nationalist, and at the same time in denouncing the Falklands War as a rubbish Thatcher-invention, he is also talking the language of the common man, the oppressed man. Those who have been hurt by the war the most are people like him, people who had no grudge against Argentina but had to fight in that war, millions of miles away from home. While at the same time many so-called "respectable" and "politically correct" Englishmen and Britons supported that war and many still think it was right to fight it. This shows the yawning gap between the working class and the upper class. Working class is sick of having to take foreigners from third world countries "taking over" their neighbourhoods with their stores and restaurants and "taking their jobs", while the government does nothing and profits from the foreign "injection".

Shaun is a kind of objective figure here, who is never too much on either side, even though he accepts Combo as a sort of father figure or big brother figure. I think even the ones among us who hold some kind of grudge towards the immigrants, especially ones from afar, will feel sickened by the scene where Combo holds a knife against an Indian boy's throat, just because he and his friends played football on "his" court. Even if some of us have had negative experiences with for instance a Pakistani or Indian, watching this makes us pity that Indian boy. I know it made me feel like that and it took away any kind of grudge I might have felt towards their kind. Stephen Graham does a great job as Combo and the young Tom Turgoose also is very effective for a debutante and for his age. This is a film everyone should watch and learn from. It is a young boy's spiritual education, as Shaun finally realizes that his father didn't die fighting for the nationalist, racist England but for a united England. And everyone must accept that their society has changed.

Combo is one unhappy, tormented character. A guy who was obviously scarred early in life and cannot feel anything but anger, or can he? Despite always trying to look as cold and hard as possible, he harbours feelings for Lol, the girlfriend of his friend who then turns away from him because of his racism, after Combo returns from prison. After he gets rebuked by Lol for confessing his feelings for her, he gets more dangerous. He only wants to feel loved and to have a good life, but can't. He hangs out with losers for the most part. One exception is the mild-mannered Milky, the half-Jamaican. This all makes you wonder: is Combo really a racist? Or is it only anger and frustration that make him say and do racist things? This is a very strong character study and one of the few films I have seen to try and deconstruct what lies behind, or inside, an average racist and his mind.

I give this film a 9, because it is a very compelling and important film and a good lesson for any young man who may harbour some kind of animosity towards people of other race. Feeding on hatred and living on hatred will only make you miserable and end in tragedy, as it does for Combo. But one can hope that he is headed towards finding redemption as well, while Shaun found the right way to go.

This movie looks "cool" and "smokin'" as its title says, but the first hint that it's not so good is the fact that non-actress Alicia Keys is one of the main stars. And she simply can't act. She does a terrible job, even though some may think she doesn't, but it's obvious, sometimes painfully obvious, that she can't act and is not a real actress. Like in the scene at the elevator, when she meets the three over the top Neo-Nazi characters. Her response is so lame and she delivers it totally unconvincingly, like she doesn't quite know what to do. And its a major mistake, casting a non-actress in a LEADING role, even in an action flick. Jeremy Piven being there doesn't do enough to save this film from being just another in a long line of unoriginal movies that are clearly a rip off of Guy Ritchie's classics like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. And one advice to the director: adding those running name titles to introduce each major character doesn't make a movie any better! Why? Because it's already been done, to death. You had it in Faculty, those two aforementioned Ritchie films and many others.

Ryan Reynolds is another reason I hate this movie, because Ryan Reynolds is the most overpaid, overrated and over-you name it in the movie industry. He simply sucks and is annoying. All this movie is made of is shootout scenes and some scenes that aim at being humorous in a rather bizarre way, like the scene with the karate boy. Vladimir Kulich, not a bad actor really, is doomed to be in second and third rate movies it seems...poor guy. And here he doesn't get more than one line even, which is totally unjust, given that he has a cool voice. Really poor and unoriginal flick, I won't even call it a film because it doesn't deserve it. Action scenes are rather well shot and that is the only treat here, along with miss Keys appearing in a short skirt. The cliché of the ending only underlines the fact that this is a turkey. 3 out of 10