Pusher – Danes do drugs

Apparently this gangster film was really huge in Europe.  I’m not sure how ‘big’ it was here, in Britain, but, in my opinion, it’s no ‘Lock Stock.’

Firstly, it feels cheap.  I know a lot of people who enjoyed it will call it ‘gritty,’ but Reservoir Dogs was ‘gritty’ and still felt stylish at the same time. ‘Pusher’ just feels like it was filmed with a video camera without anyone’s permission on each location.

It’s about a gangster, who seems to dabble in everything from drugs to armed robbery, trying to organise a drugs deal which – guess what – goes wrong and leaves him in debt to an even nastier gangster.  Do we care?  Not really.

I have no problem with films about gangsters (or ‘bad guys’ to use another term).  We don’t have to like them to enjoy the film, just as long as they provide some form of entertainment.  Our central character here doesn’t.  He’s bland.  He doesn’t ever really inspire us to care whether he lives, dies or finds a way of paying his way out of the situation.  He just sort of spends the film wandering around doing some half-hearted effort of calling in old debts.

And that’s about it.  A cheap-looking film with bland characters who you won’t really care about and a plot that’s been done to death.  Yes, the film has Mads Mikklesen in an early role, but he doesn’t do enough to elevate it to anything other than very ordinary.

However, this film has seemed to have spawned a couple of sequels meaning many must have seen something in it that I didn’t.  I guess if you can put up with the subtitles and don’t mind the rawest of raw films then you may get something out of it.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back