Director and writer, Anders Thomas Jensen makes a poke at dark humor with this Danish film, The Green Butchers. The leads make the effort to rescue a too humanizing and sentimental ending script and a beginning script that is a little too dry and not quite dark enough to keep the audience intrigued.
The Green Butchers (Grønne slagtere, De)
1 & 1/2 Stars
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| Released on DVD May 17 |
Director and writer, Anders Thomas Jensen makes a poke at dark humor with this Danish film, The Green Butchers. The leads make the effort to rescue a too humanizing and sentimental ending script and a beginning script that is a little too dry and not quite dark enough to keep the audience intrigued.
A tasty recipe for human flesh makes to small time butchers a huge hit in a small Danish town. Sven (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikola lie Kaas) open up a butcher shop and start their sales off with a misfortunate electrician who ended up dead in their freezer. Both men are quite a mess and have huge issues, Sven has an anxiety disorder and Bjarne is a major pothead, but somehow they figure out how to get themselves out of or rather into quite a mess with serving up this electrician. This special meat dish they serve up to the community gets them all kinds of attention and turns them into big stars, but little does anybody know that they are eating away at the towns electricians toes or fingers. Bjarne falls in love with undertaker’s daughter and starts to have issues with what they must do to stay on top. Enjoying their success and getting even more successful means more and more misfortunate souls must find their ways into the freezer. Ironically The Green Butchers end up with some pretty positive messages and nice characters for such a cannibalistic script and dark humored film.
Spending too much time trying to get past the grotesque subject matter kept me from enjoying what could have been a simple and interesting film. The Green Butchers didn’t work for me, but may intrigue the Danish. Who knows, maybe the Danish since of humor is a great deal more dry and different than in the U.S. I just can’t find humor in cannibalism. Luckily, The Green Butchers does add discreetness and no gore to such a subject matter. It’s the idea of the story being implanted in the back of my brain that keeps feeding forward to cause disturbance in my well-being. It truly is visual non-offensive, but mentally sticks to your teeth.