The younger brother of a surgeon is killed, and now the surgeon is trying to find the one responsible for his little brother’s murder. This leads him into the city’s underworld, where a psychotic tough guy rules.
Darkland is a Danish revenge movie that is quite entertaining. We follow a doctor whose younger brother has a criminal background. One day, the younger brother visits him at home and asks to borrow some money, but the older brother wants nothing to do with it. He will regret that, even though his little brother is a loser.
Shortly after, the younger brother is taken to the hospital after a beating, and he dies. This changes the life of the older brother, who is now seeking revenge and gradually begins to lose control. He has something important waiting for him at home—his pregnant wife—but his desire for revenge completely consumes him, and it won’t end until he confronts the person responsible for his little brother’s death.
The movie feels like a mix of Death Wish and The Punisher. We witness several violent scenes and killings, and the villain is highly caricatured.
The villains are all non-native, so the movie has some social commentary that Donald Trump would love—and that also speaks a lot of truth. The father of the protagonist refuses to get a job in the country that took him in. What an ungrateful piece of garbage the father is!
The antagonist is a psycho, and the actor overacts way too much. In some scenes, I lost respect for him because of his height. We’re talking about the height of Al Pacino. They managed to hide it for quite a while, but in the scene where he has a meeting with the other trash controlling the underworld, you can see how short he is. He should be ashamed of himself for being that short and acting so tough.
Even the protagonist, who is supposed to be the good guy, becomes unsympathetic when his hate takes control of his entire life. He starts training again to beat up the villains, injects steroids to become stronger, and doesn’t care about his pregnant wife or the future of his child.
The atmosphere is great. Darkland is a dark movie, and it’s really effective at portraying the protagonist’s state of mind when he’s lost his soul and his hateful spirit takes over his entire body. He looks like a crazy man and becomes someone he never wanted to be—his own nemesis. In the end, these two men are quite alike.
What I missed was the opportunity to follow the main antagonist and his henchmen more closely than what we see in Darkland. I wish the antagonist had been written better and behaved more like a real human than the trash he’s portrayed as. There isn’t much depth to be found here; it’s a straightforward revenge movie that delivers what we’re looking for when we sit down to watch this genre. In that respect, I can’t say that Darkland disappoints; it pleasantly surprises as it becomes darker and meaner.