MOVIE REVIEWS
‘PUSHER” is a realistically depressing low-budget movie about Copenhagen drug dealers collecting and incurring debts. It makes the Danish criminal life look miserable, bleak and pretty dull during the stretches when people aren’t threatening or beating each other.
Nasty and seedy, it’s another film clearly inspired by Tarantino’s work (especially the obligatory torture scene), and by Abel Ferrara’s ”Bad Lieutenant,” but its predictable, derivative plot is unleavened by sympathetic characters or amusing dialogue.
Instead, ”Pusher”’s cast of thugs, hookers and junkies is authentically inarticulate and pathetic. This combined with the director’s pseudo-documentary style (is there some law in Denmark that demands the use of a hand-held camera and minimal lighting?) gives ”Pusher” a grinding quality that makes you wish that the protagonist would hurry up and get killed by the big shots to whom he owes all the money.
Frank (Bodnia) is a tough small-time thirtysomething drug dealer, in hock to bigger Yugoslav dealer Milo (Buric), who’s sort of his friend. When not pushing or doing cocaine, Frank tools around Copenhagen with his sidekick Tony (Mads Mikkelsen) playing the car stereo at top volume, while both of them swear a lot and talk crudely about women. Frank has extreme intimacy problems with his waifish junkie hooker, girlfriend Vicki (Laura Drasbaek),
Things really start to go wrong for Frank when a deal with a Swedish stranger is interrupted by the cops and he is forced to dump Milo’s very expensive heroin in the lake.
Unfortunately, Milo isn’t interested in his excuses: he just wants his money back and quickly. Frank beats Tony to a pulp with a baseball bat for talking to the cops, and then runs around town for a week desperately trying to raise the money before Milo and his goon Radovan catch up with him.
It’s a shame that the dialogue is so weak, the plot so familiar, the pace so meandering, and the lighting so poor, because ”Pusher”’s cast is uniformly excellent. Kim Bodnia, who vaguely resembles Bob Hoskins, does a particulary fine job. He somehow manages to make you care about Frank, even though the character has no redeeming qualities.