Ten Stars or Less

If you watched Stockholm, I can only hope you were as disappointed as I was. Personally, I love all things Swedish, so I was thrilled to see a movie set in Stockholm about a historical Swedish bank robbery. This event caused the media to coin the phrase “Stockholm Syndrome”, which is a term used to describe hostages who bond with their captives in order to survive.

First things first, if you research the bank robbery, the whole thing was done by Swedish people. So why was Ethen Hawke (born in Texas) cast to play an American “cowboy” who holds up a Sweden bank? This film twisted the story to gain a wider audience which takes away the authenticity of the whole thing. I like Mark Strong and think he is a fantastic bad guy, but he is also not Swedish. Born in London, Strong plays the famous criminal Gunnar Sorensson. One of the other main characters is Polischefen Mattsson, which was played by Canadian Christopher Heyerdahl. This movie looked so low budget, I don’t understand how no one else was approached to play these roles. The only authentic part of this film is Noomi Rapace who is actually Swedish. She may be famous for playing the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but if you look deep enough on Netflix, she has a half dozen movies on there.

The whole bank robbery took the country by storm and was the first major crime ever to be broadcast on national TV. If you sit back and try to view this movie as a comedy, you may be one of the only ones. I didn’t laugh once and thought the whole thing was over the top. A lot of the stuff going on made no sense whatever so ever. The cat and mouse game was pretty bad and it is hard to tell if this planned or if it actually happened this way. Stockholm could have been so much better, both in terms of who was cast and who wrote the story. If anything, the movie mocked everything about the incident, whether it was really silly or not. 1/10