{"id":143001,"date":"2025-09-09T02:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T02:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/143001\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T02:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T02:11:08","slug":"mads-mikkelsen-is-a-wacko-john-lennon-in-new-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/143001\/","title":{"rendered":"Mads Mikkelsen Is a Wacko John Lennon in New Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mads Mikkelsen<\/a> may be a cunning and intimidating presence to American audiences who know him from Casino Royale, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and TV\u2019s Hannibal. But in his native Denmark, he\u2019s proven himself a far more chameleonic artist, especially when partnering with director Anders Thomas Jensen. <\/p>\n

In their six collaborations (not counting The Promised Land, which Jensen co-wrote), Mikkelsen has exhibited a fondness for crazy comedic characters, be it a masturbation-fixated mutant in Men & Chicken or a vengeance-seeking military vet in Riders of Justice. Those off-kilter instincts continue to be spot-in in The Last Viking, a black comedy in which the leading man plays an odd duck who believes he\u2019s John Lennon\u2014and is thrust on an odyssey to reunite with the rest of his (fake) Beatles bandmates.<\/p>\n

Screening at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>, Anders\u2019 absurdist latest stars Mikkelsen as Manfred, a troubled adult with curly blonde hair that\u2019s parted to the side and spectacles that can\u2019t hide his eccentric autistic disposition. In his bedroom poring over a puzzle, Manfred is joined by his brother Anker (Jensen regular Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who\u2019s on the run from what TV reports reveal is a bank robbery that ended in multiple deaths. <\/p>\n

With sirens and helicopters audible outside, Anker asks Manfred to eat a key to a train station locker that contains the cash, and the swiftness with which he complies is hilariously surprising. Less amusing, however, is the look of dismay on Manfred\u2019s face as Anker, seeing that he\u2019s surrounded, repeatedly smashes his hand into a tiled kitchen table\u2014a manifestation of his lifelong anger issues.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Fifteen years later, Anker emerges from the clink determined to recover his loot. Upon arriving home, though, he\u2019s stonewalled by his brother, whom his sister Freja (Bodil J\u00f8rgensen) indicates is now known as John. Anker has no interest in using Manfred\u2019s nom de guerre, but initially, he has bigger fish to fry, since Flemming (Nicolas Bro) arrives on his doorstep demanding the stolen money (or else), and John demonstrates his irrepressible habit of stealing other people\u2019s dogs and claiming them as his own. <\/p>\n

Having told his sibling to stash his ill-gotten gains at their mother\u2019s old house, the two embark on a road trip to that rural abode. Yet before they arrive, Anker deliberately uses the name \u201cManfred\u201d and, for his provocation, watches as John leaps out of the moving vehicle. When Anker does the same thing at the hospital, John lunges through an open window, landing on a Volkswagen multiple flights below. In the aftermath of this madness, John is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder stemming from past trauma that, flashbacks illuminate, stems from their abusive father (Lars Ranthe).<\/p>\n

As a child, John fancied himself a Viking and, for his make-believe, suffered schoolyard abuse that their dad blamed on Anker. In the present, Anker pays Dr. Lothar (Lars Brygmann) to spring John from psychiatric ward confinement, and the physician defends his patient\u2019s Beatlemania, stating \u201cEveryone\u2019s entitled to their unique reality.\u201d Moreover, he has an inspired idea: to shake John from his delusion, they should lean into it. <\/p>\n

\"AA still from ‘The Last Viking’ Rolf Konow\/Rolf Konow <\/p>\n

No sooner have they reached their homestead\u2014which is now an Airbnb run by Margrethe (Sofie Gr\u00e5b\u00f8l) and Werner (S\u00f8ren Malling)\u2014than Lothar shows up with Anton (Peter D\u00fcring) and Hamdan (Kardo Razzazi), the former a mute who thinks himself Ringo Starr, and the latter a multiple personality disorder-afflicted Swede who\u2019s convinced he\u2019s both Paul McCartney and George Harrison, not to mention (among others) Iron Man and Heimrich Himmler.<\/p>\n

The Last Viking thereafter settles into a comfortably loopy groove, with Jensen\u2019s story balancing John and company\u2019s clumsy efforts to become a band\u2014an endeavor complicated by the fact that Hamdan additionally imagines that he\u2019s ABBA\u2019s Bj\u00f6rn Ulvaeus\u2014and Anker\u2019s attempts to get his brother to point him toward the buried money. <\/p>\n

Though Kaas\u2019 Anker is the proceedings\u2019 nominal protagonist, Mikkelsen\u2019s weirdo is its goofy engine, prone at a moment\u2019s notice to blurt out some nonchalant inappropriateness, as when he remarks about Margrethe and Werner, who\u2019s facially disfigured, \u201cHow can you two be married when he\u2019s so ugly and you\u2019re so good-looking? Is that why you don\u2019t have kids? Because he\u2019s so ugly?\u201d <\/p>\n

\"AA still from ‘The Last Viking’ Rolf Konow\/Rolf Konow <\/p>\n

Such ridiculousness is par for the course with John, much to the chagrin of Anker, who can\u2019t even reference his sibling\u2019s birthday without being told that, actually, all of those holidays were celebrated in Liverpool.<\/p>\n

In a polo shirt and windbreaker that amplifies his awkwardness, John is an idiosyncratically strange bird, and yet neither actor nor director treats him as a cheap joke. On the contrary, Jensen confirms with The Last Viking that he\u2019s exceedingly gifted at melding dark humor and violence with sincere sentimentality. No matter his action\u2019s beatings, car crashes, and dismemberment, he\u2019s a big softy, and he eventually casts Anker and John\u2019s odyssey as a tale about how people are multifaceted and boast the ability to choose who they want to be, not to mention use guises to cope with deep hurt and grief. <\/p>\n

For Mikkelsen and Kaas\u2019 characters, remembering and forgetting can be confusing and damaging, and it\u2019s only through confrontation of the truth, and acceptance of each other, that healing can begin.<\/p>\n

Withdrawn and anxious, John is a lost and scared child in an adult\u2019s body, and the furious Anker is a stunted adolescent trying to rage his pain away, and The Last Viking parallels their paths with a deftness that\u2019s emblematic of its storytelling. <\/p>\n

\"AndersAnders Thomas Jensen Anders Overgaard <\/p>\n

Jensen\u2019s misfits are in search of approval, compassion, and camaraderie, and his narrative builds to a bonkers conclusion in which the sights of women being pummeled and body parts getting snipped coexist with tender instances of revelation and understanding. The film (which invites interpretations as a trans allegory) walks a careful line between earnestness and extremeness, and it concludes on a beautifully sweet note that\u2019s apt to bring a tear to viewers\u2019 eyes.<\/p>\n

Bookended by an animated legend about a Viking chieftain who, in the wake of his son losing an arm, compels his subjects to follow suit and lop off their own arms\u2014because \u201cif everyone is broken, no one is broken\u201d\u2014The Last Viking is a big-hearted fable of self-actualization, tolerance, and togetherness. It\u2019s proof that, while Mikkelsen may be a great boogeyman, he\u2019s also one of cinema\u2019s most daring and dexterous actors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mads Mikkelsen may be a cunning and intimidating presence to American audiences who know him from Casino Royale,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,15763,206,13979,56692],"class_list":["post-143001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-john-lennon","tag-movies","tag-the-beatles","tag-toronto-international-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}