Black's Game

Released by: Lionsgate
Released on: February 12, 2013.
Director: Oskar Thor Axelsson
Cast: Thor Kristjansson, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Damon Younger, Maria Birta
Year: 2012
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The Movie

It's a good thing that Black's Game was exec produced by Nicolas Winding Refn because, from beginning to end, it feels like it's jockeying to be the fourth installment in his Pusher series of films.

Set in Iceland and taking place in 1999 the story focuses on Stebbi (Kristjansson), a young college student who, after assaulting someone in a bar whilst blackout drunk, finds himself in need of a good lawyer. Who should appear but an old friend, Toti (Johannesson), a bulking, shaved head badass that's got his own criminal activities to look after. Stebbi doesn't know where to turn so Tito offers him his own slick lawyer's info if Stebbi will just do one job for Tito: He's to break into someone's apartment and find his massive stash of drugs that the guy hid before he got nabbed by the cops. Stebbi figures out better than anyone else where the drugs are and, amidst sort of celebrating, gets attacked by someone else looking for the same drugs. Stebbi loses his shit, beating this guy nearly to death, and Tito laughingly gives him the nickname “Psycho Stebbi” and thus his career in crime is launched.

Tito is building his own breakaway drug empire, at a time apparently in Iceland when serious hard drugs were finally getting smuggled in. He gives Stebbi a job as driver and they begin to consolidate their business. Stebbi meets Dagny (Birta), the lone female in the film and quite the sexual muse to the gang. Things are going well enough until Tito's old buddy and boss Bruno (Younger) comes back on the scene and takes over Tito's enterprise. Bruno is adept at running the business, though, and everyone's making lots of money quickly and having a ball. However, it's clear that whereas Tito was all about youthful exuberant excess Bruno's priorities are much more sinister and far more dangerous for everyone.

Things begin to fray at the edges after a little time, though, as it becomes clear that Bruno is more than a little insane. After a gang member vanishes and Bruno puts them through a needless bank heist Tito is becoming suspect while Stebbi becomes more and more of an addict, hooked on his own wares. At this point the film almost grinds to a halt narratively as no one is really doing anything different and it's not until the cops approach Stebbi and he realizes the depths he's into all this that the story picks up again. He's still pretty wired and, while he finally gets to hook up with Dagny he also becomes terrified of Bruno after he shows him the severed hand of the missing gang member and also rapes him. While Stebbi is still trying to work it all out so that Tito and Dagny don't get screwed over by the cops everything comes crashing down on New Year's Eve 2000, appropriately enough signaling the end of it all.

The film is based on a book written about these actual events or, as the beginning of the film touts, “Based on real hardcore shit.” And while the story overall is a good, gritty, violent drug dealer movie it's also never quite clear on whether it's enamored with its protagonists or just sympathetic. Refn's Pusher series held up its characters for all their good and bad, making the point of the stickiness of the morality of the world they inhabit, worthy of examination as struggling humans trying to make the best of things. Black's Game gets part of that right but isn't properly grounded in either the events it's relating or in the tone in which the characters' actions are handled. It wants to revel in the excess but ignore the consequences, much like Stebbi's character, but wants it all to turn out “good” for its hero, making some kind of pitch into gleeful violence rather than any sort of consequence suffered at all.

Audio/Video/Extras:

The film is presented with MPEG-2 encoding in 16x9 widescreen at 2.40:1 and this big aspect shows off the Icelandic urban and rural scenes quite nicely. The film's cinematography matches its subject matter with a grim, bleak, dark tone that the DVD tries its best to keep up with. Black levels never look bad but it would be nice to have more definition within them. But the colorful scenes are well-balanced throughout the film as well so I guess it all works out in the end. Audio is available in an either Icelandic or English 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack that is put to very good use as it, like the cinematography, plays a mood-establishing element in the film and helps underscore it thematically as well. English and Spanish subtitles are also available.

A made-for-Icelandic-TV Behind The Scenes featurette is included, running at 9:42 and featuring interviews with just the main actors. The red-band DVD trailer is also available along with a few other trailers for Lionsgate titles.

The Final Word:

Black's Game is unique in its depiction of the evolution of a drug scene in Iceland but uses many drug-running story elements that are fairly standard at this point. It's still pretty entertaining, fairly well-paced (except for a bit in the middle), well-acted and appropriately raw in its depiction of the Icelandic underworld. Side note: The DVD cover art features an actor/character not even remotely connected to the movie but trying to sell its “badassness,” I suppose. But don't let that put you off.