carbuff Black humor with sort of a happy black ending, which is about as close to a spoiler as I want to get. It's an odd grim movie that starts out really strong and compelling, and while it loses steam as it moves along, it still manages to keep you guessing until the end. It's a bit bloody in parts, but nothing, I'm afraid, that's too terribly shocking to a modern audience. While this film seems to be assembled from parts of a bunch of different movies ("Very Bad Things", among many others, comes immediately to mind), the end result is reasonably original.Scandinavians do dark stuff better than anyone else for some reason- -must be the whole Arctic Circle thing or something. Nobody in this film is particularly likable, but it is different enough from American movies and has an excellent foreign ensemble cast, so it's a nice change of pace. I mean, jeesh it's only 85 minutes long, so you don't have a real big commitment here. Just shut it off, if it doesn't hold your attention, but my guess is that it will, although it's another film that may leave you feeling a bit dirty at the end, which seems to be becoming quite common. That might accurately reflect the world we are living in.

Jonathon Dabell Jackpot is based on an original screen story by Jo Nesbo (the Scandinavian novelist behind crime bestseller Headhunters, as well as several successful children's' books which have earned him favourable comparisons to the late, great Roald Dahl). Nesbø, it seems, is the new Stieg Larsson and Roald Dahl rolled into one – high praise indeed.Jackpot is a Coen/Ritchie/Tarantino-like story set in a remote town on the Norwegian-Swedish border. It begins as a trio of excited youths run into a sleazy strip joint known as Pink Heaven only to be blasted back through the doors and windows by a maelstrom of automatic gunfire. When the police arrive, they find the place heaped with dead bodies and literally awash with blood; apparently the result of a massive gunfight. Intense, hard-nosed cop Solør (Henrik Mestad) surveys the bloodbath with a trained eye and tells his assistant Gina (Marie Blokhus) to book a nearby hotel, sensing that here is a case that will take considerable time to unravel. Unexpectedly, Solør discovers a survivor lying beneath one of the victims. Oscar Svendson (Kyrre Hellum), the survivor, is the only person who knows what really happened at this scene of carnage. Solør takes him to an interview room where he points out that it is his job to determine whether Oscar is a suspect in, or witness of, the crime that has occurred. What follows is Oscar's (possibly fictitious) account of the events leading up to the Pink Heaven massacre. Jackpot is pure absurdist cinema, one of the most off-the-wall crime capers ever made, with a narrative that deliberately embraces its more farcical elements and exaggerates them to the point where the story becomes a non-stop box of surprises. Imagine the scene from Pulp Fiction, where John Travolta accidentally blows the head off a prisoner in the back of his and Samuel L. Jackson's car and has to call in professional "cleaner" Harvey Keitel to sort out the problem… Jackpot basically adopts the same tone of edgy black comedy, at once shockingly violent yet incredibly funny, and sustains it for its entire 86 minute running time. The performances are engaging throughout, Hellum holding the madness together as the hopelessly unlucky victim/incredibly skilled liar Oscar, while Mestad has his moments as the slightly unhinged cop. Best of all are Ousdal and Berning as two of the betting winners, utterly disreputable ex-criminals whose capacity for violence is matched only by their child-like actions and reactions to everything that happens to them. Magnus Martens directs the film with enormous confidence, generating genuine belly laughs from the sickest of material. Few scenes, for instance, can rival the sheer hilarity of Thor's hysterically funny "corpse puppetry" scene, where he amuses himself by manipulating a dead body to scare Oscar. It's bad taste comedy taken to such a level that it almost transcends criticism on normal terms. There are a few weaknesses with the film, such as an over-plotted final quarter which becomes tricky to follow, plus a disappointingly brief running time which rushes to the denouement too quickly for the film's own good. Nevertheless Jackpot is a tremendously entertaining ride and yet another example of the high quality cinema coming out of Scandinavia at this time.

tohalloran I don't like gore but the gore is so cartoonish here it does not interfere with the fun. This film has everything.It has the basic convoluted crime story,unbelievably funny dialogue and great characterisation. There is nothing not to like in this film.The bad guys are well drawn and never given the outlandish lines that Tarentino gives them, they remain human, stupidly criminal and never the mere 'apes' that the police hero sees. I was a little thrown by the ending. I don't know how we were meant to judge the detective but of course it hardly matters. This shames Hollywood once again, just like Headhunters did. If you don't find this hilarious the fault is with you.

writers_reign Headhunters has a lot to answer for. It was an exceptional thriller and one that I will definitely buy on DVD. On the other hand it was responsible for directing my steps to the theatre showing Jackpot, om the seemingly logical but ultimately foolish grounds that Norway was emerging as a new source of top-flight thrillers. In my dreams. This is a thriller that thinks it's a Black Comedy then decides it is a thriller after all and winds up being neither. For reasons best known to the author a non-criminal becomes the fourth man in a football pool syndicate and, charged with filling in the coupon to their instructions, changes one of the fixtures which results in 12 out of 12 correct forecasts and nets them a jackpot. Whilst he is out buying beer to celebrate two of the other three kill the third partner. The fourth man returns - the killing occurs in his apartment - and is more or less obliged to watch as the other two behead the corpse. Eventually - don't ask - they drive to a local strip club where one of the two assassins owes the owner a considerable sum. There follows a Mexican stand-off with no less than three guns pointing at various protagonists. Whilst this is going on a group of young men arrive in search of (their words) pussy and are blown away; the police arrive to find the non-criminal clutching a rifle, surrounded by stiffs and lying beneath an obese woman. From there it goes downhill. Don't say I didn't warn you.