{"id":657193,"date":"2026-06-25T08:38:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T08:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657193\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T08:38:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T08:38:15","slug":"the-last-viking-review-mads-mikkelsen-thinks-hes-john-lennon-in-von-trier-ish-prankster-comedy-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657193\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Viking review \u2013 Mads Mikkelsen thinks he\u2019s John Lennon in Von Trier-ish prankster comedy | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anders Thomas Jensen is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and veteran of the Dogme 95 years at Denmark\u2019s Zentropa Studios. He now brings us this slapstick-violent black comedy and shaggy dog story of gruesome silliness. It is well acted but relentlessly and bizarrely unfunny. So unfunny as to be almost funny, but not really, in that the unfunniness approaches the condition of being itself a joke, though without really arriving. It could be that the spectre of Zentropa\u2019s dark master of the prank, Lars von Trier<\/a>, is hovering somewhere in the corner of the frame.<\/p>\n

Mads Mikkelsen is cast against type as nerdy loser Manfred, an abuse survivor with learning disabilities whose tough-guy brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) robs a bank. Before being arrested, Anker gives poor twitchy Manfred the key to the railway station locker where he has stashed the loot, and tells him to get the cash once the cops have gone and bury it in the woodland behind their old family home where their dad used to brutalise them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But when he gets out of jail 15 years later, Anker finds that Manfred has retreated into a delusional state, believing himself to be John Lennon, and is too upset by everyone disbelieving him to remember where he buried the money. So Anker, with the help of a rogue psychiatric nurse, has to round up three other dysfunctional cases who variously believe themselves to be Ringo, Paul and George so he can reunite the band in the remote Danish forest for a couple of numbers, in the hope that Manfred will chill out sufficiently to remember where to start digging.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s admittedly a funny premise but executed wearyingly: I laughed at Mikkelsen\u2019s crazy physical comedy at first before realising that the film consists of almost nothing other than a kind of goofy, humourless violence. Jensen has many skills as a film-maker but comedy is frankly not one of them. Sofie Gr\u00e5b\u00f8l<\/a> does her best as a martial arts enthusiast who now owns the boys\u2019 family home.<\/p>\n

The Last Viking is in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 June and is showing in Australia as part of the Hurtigruten Nordic film festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anders Thomas Jensen is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and veteran of the Dogme 95 years at Denmark\u2019s Zentropa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-657193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}