Jackpot is based on an original screen story by Jo Nesbo (the Scandinavian novelist behind crime bestseller Headhunters, as well as several successful children's' books which have earned him favourable comparisons to the late, great Roald Dahl). Nesbø, it seems, is the new Stieg Larsson and Roald Dahl rolled into one – high praise indeed.
Jackpot is a Coen/Ritchie/Tarantino-like story set in a remote town on the Norwegian-Swedish border. It begins as a trio of excited youths run into a sleazy strip joint known as Pink Heaven only to be blasted back through the doors and windows by a maelstrom of automatic gunfire. When the police arrive, they find the place heaped with dead bodies and literally awash with blood; apparently the result of a massive gunfight. Intense, hard-nosed cop Solør (Henrik Mestad) surveys the bloodbath with a trained eye and tells his assistant Gina (Marie Blokhus) to book a nearby hotel, sensing that here is a case that will take considerable time to unravel. Unexpectedly, Solør discovers a survivor lying beneath one of the victims. Oscar Svendson (Kyrre Hellum), the survivor, is the only person who knows what really happened at this scene of carnage. Solør takes him to an interview room where he points out that it is his job to determine whether Oscar is a suspect in, or witness of, the crime that has occurred. What follows is Oscar's (possibly fictitious) account of the events leading up to the Pink Heaven massacre.
Jackpot is pure absurdist cinema, one of the most off-the-wall crime capers ever made, with a narrative that deliberately embraces its more farcical elements and exaggerates them to the point where the story becomes a non-stop box of surprises. Imagine the scene from Pulp Fiction, where John Travolta accidentally blows the head off a prisoner in the back of his and Samuel L. Jackson's car and has to call in professional "cleaner" Harvey Keitel to sort out the problem
Jackpot basically adopts the same tone of edgy black comedy, at once shockingly violent yet incredibly funny, and sustains it for its entire 86 minute running time. The performances are engaging throughout, Hellum holding the madness together as the hopelessly unlucky victim/incredibly skilled liar Oscar, while Mestad has his moments as the slightly unhinged cop. Best of all are Ousdal and Berning as two of the betting winners, utterly disreputable ex-criminals whose capacity for violence is matched only by their child-like actions and reactions to everything that happens to them.
Magnus Martens directs the film with enormous confidence, generating genuine belly laughs from the sickest of material. Few scenes, for instance, can rival the sheer hilarity of Thor's hysterically funny "corpse puppetry" scene, where he amuses himself by manipulating a dead body to scare Oscar. It's bad taste comedy taken to such a level that it almost transcends criticism on normal terms. There are a few weaknesses with the film, such as an over-plotted final quarter which becomes tricky to follow, plus a disappointingly brief running time which rushes to the denouement too quickly for the film's own good. Nevertheless Jackpot is a tremendously entertaining ride and yet another example of the high quality cinema coming out of Scandinavia at this time.
