GLENN KENNY'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 8/16/06)

Three features totaling over five hours concerning the sleaze and slaughter of the Danish drug trade sounds like a lot to take in, and it is. So while I have no problem enthusiastically recommending writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy, I'd also heartily discourage all but the most rabid crime-movie nuts from consuming the whole thing in one afternoon or evening. Refn himself waited almost ten years between 1996's first Pusher film, simply titled Pusher, and the second, 2004's With Blood on My Hands. The third, I'm the Angel of Death, followed in 2005. Crime-movie nuts with a sharp eye for recent movie history will look at the production date for the first Pusher picture and figure it to be part of the international ricochet effect of Tarantinoism. But although the movies are rife with the sort of startling turnabouts and graphic violence (caveat emptor: the final 20 minutes of Angel are particularly grisly and genuinely shocking) that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction made the world box office safe for, Refn's tone and style is miles away from Tarantino's pop-art-happy mien. The three movies don't comprise one overall narrative (which makes them very easy to enjoy as individual works) but instead share characters and take place in and around the same racket. The shooting style is fluid but never florid, going for a loping realism. In this vein, the characterizations are reminiscent of the early novels of ace crime writer George V. Higgins, in which thoroughly amoral characters hew to a peculiar ethic in order to get whatever scam or deal they're enmeshed in just get done. They also while away idle hours engaging in idly blustery dialogues and learn at some point that even when crime does pay, it's kind of a pain in the ass, or worse. All of it is very convincingly acted out by Refn's cast; James Bond fans can get a good taste of Mads Mikkelsen, the upcoming Casino Royale's villain Le Chiffre. In Pusher and Blood, he's outstanding as a knucklehead small-timer whose baseball-bat beating leaves him more of a loser than seemed possible—pretty much precisely the opposite of the Ian Fleming creation he'll bring to the screen later this year. —Glenn Kenny