Oscar wakes up under an obese stripper, surrounded by dead bodies and with a police officer pointing a gun at him. Taken in for questioning, he tells the sequence of events leading up to the shootout, beginning with his group of ex-con work colleagues winning 1,739,361 kroner (about £190,000) in a football pool. However, a situation involving a group of criminals and a large amount of money will never run smooth, and before long there are corpses to dispose of and police to avoid.
Jo Nesbø is a highly successful Norwegian author of entertaining if somewhat formulaic crime novels, who rose to international prominence in the wake of Stieg Larsson’s stratospheric popularity, and was given an extra boost by the 2012 release of Headhunters, an adaptation of one of his stand alone works. Jackpot gives Nesbø a story credit, although whether this is in terms of a narrative outline of the screenplay or the film being an adaptation of an unpublished tale is not reliably stated anywhere. Whatever the origin, it certainly captures the violence and black humour of his previous work.
The film’s set-up is highly reminiscent of The Usual Suspects, with a framing device of the lone survivor of a bloodbath recounting his tale under police interrogation. It gives us an equal possibility of an unreliable narrator, from whose perspective much of the story is told. However, despite the film’s graphic violence, it maintains a light-hearted tone throughout, with the inherent ridiculousness of events allowed to come through. As Oscar is dragged from one demented situation to the next, you get the distinct impression that the level of intellect on display likely goes a long way to explaining how these guys ended up getting sent to prison in the first place.
There isn’t much characterisation to speak of, although with the film’s brief running time there isn’t much room for it anyway. Other than Oscar and the enigmatic police detective Solør, the only character with much substance is Oscar’s friend Tor (or Thor, the subtitles are annoyingly inconsistent), whose large debt to some unpleasant people adds a degree of urgency and further danger to proceedings.
Incongruous touches like Oscar surreptitiously hiding a severed finger when the police enter his flat, the search for a head in a roadside ditch, or someone taking a phone call in the middle of a gunfight all add to the slightly surreal tone, while the constant sense of danger prevents it from descending into sheer farce.
Overall Verdict: While in no way groundbreaking stuff, Jackpot is a fast-paced and entertaining black comedy that continues the recent trend of quality Scandinavian imports.
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall