Napapiirin sankarit
Director: Dome Karukoski
Writer: Pekko Pesonen
Cast: Jussi Vatanen, Jasper Pääkkönen, Timo Lavikainen, Pamela Tola

Plot:
Janne (Jussi Vatanen) is living off wellfare and doing nothing all day, while his girlfriend Inari (Pamela Tola) takes care of pretty much everything. And even when she asks him to buy them a digital receiver before the analogue TV is cancelled that night, he fails to accomplish that task. So Inari tells him: either he gets that receiver that same night, or she’s going to leave him. So Janne sets out on a road trip with his best friends Kapu (Jasper Pääkkönen) und Tapio (Timo Lavikainen).

The film has its moments, but then it also has a lot of issues, mostly misogyny. It is nice but it ends up feeling way too long and extremely predictable with the most interesting character getting the least attention.

I suspect that people who like Judd Apatow movies will find this one very funny. People who identify with menchildren. People who think it’s a woman’s job to raise  a guy until he’s semi-responsible and almost adult enough to be in a meaningful relationship with. In short, people who are not me. [And I’m not even getting into the fuckery with the female Swedish waterball team.]

Which is kind of sad because the movie had chances to not go that way. The first five minutes are quite brilliant, with a melancholy short story about a tree where the men of the area have been going to hang themselves for generations. The story is told by Tapio and I really liked it. So it was clear that subsequently, neither the tree nor Tapio get much mor screen time.  [But then again maybe I only regretted this because less time meant less dickery on his part.]

What did work was the cinematography – Lapland looked really nice. Despite the snow and the cold. [I’m so sick of winter already.] And I really liked the music.

But unforunately the movie mostly dragged – it felt way longer than the meagre 90 minutes it is. And the parts that didn’t drag were nice at best.

Summarising: Yeah, no.