Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
The inciting incident in Shorta is the Danish police’s arrest of one Talib Ben Hassi a few days ago that sees the 19 year old hospitalised after being held in a chokehold. The two arresting officers are placed on administrative leave, while the other copper present, Simon Sears’ Jens Høyer has just returned after a few days on the sick. Internal Affairs would like a word with him, but with tensions running high in the Arabic community, he’s needed on patrol.
He’s assigned to ride along with Jacob Lohmann’s Mike Andersen, who is essentially every all cops are bastards trope rolled up into one repugnant lump. Racist, abusive, violence as a first resort, etc, etc. Very much one of those bad apples you hear about, and he’s keen to get Jens in line, closing ranks with his police brothers and absolving themselves of any wrongdoing while arresting Ben Hassi.
Before they can make much headway into that conversation, they chase a suspicious car into the majority Arabic ghetto of Svalegården (which I though sounded a bit pejorative, but that’s the Danish government classification, not mine). The police have been told not to patrol there today. I think the reason given was “because of the plot”. At any rate, they wind up deep in there when news breaks that Ben Hassi has died, kicking off city wide unrest and meaning that when they get targets painted on them by the locals, they need to get out of their on their own.
Well, not quite on their own, as it turns out the kid that Mike was trying to arrest on a trumped up non-offence, Tarek Zayat’s Amos Al-Shami, will help them navigate out of an increasingly violent and unpredictable situation. I guess he’s one of the good muslims. What starts as a tense game of cat and mouse between the cops and the mob grows increasing daft and morally confused until it reaches an ending that will bring no closure or satisfaction to anyone.
Writer / director partnership Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm are biting off a lot here, and could have used a few more chewing lessons. The tone taken here might be appropriate for something more schlocky like Assault on Precinct 13 but taking very real-world, keenly felt problems with policing and dropping it into an action framework is crass, at best. at least with a script and characters this stupid. And frankly, the least said about what appears to be some attempt at a final act redemption for Mike, a character that was recently gleefully machine-gunning the people he’s sworn to protect, is, well, a tad stupid.
I’m not writing these creators off, there’s enough good work done in the early going of this to show they can wrangle an action thriller together, but maybe they should go a bit easier on the social commentary, or work on abstracting it a bit more so that it feels less grotty. Alternatively, there’s for sure a number of films to be made exploring the tensions between the police and the policed, the institutionalised racism, police training, the atmosphere caused by a lack of integration of migrants, and the causes of that lack of integration, and so on, but the avenue for that exploration should not be modelled on Dredd 3D.
Watch Dredd instead.