Based on an actual the-money’s-still-out-there 2008 heist, the new Danish thumper The Quiet Ones begins with a killer set-piece: an attack on a bank courier van by an AK-touting thug crew, all captured in one long shot from the back seat and making breath-catching use of every window and rearview mirror. That heist doesn’t pan out, as it happens, though both couriers are popped in the street; likewise, the thorny, cold-blooded film that follows turns out to be a bit of a hyperventilated letdown.
Heist movies are funny things — as a subgenre, their singular structure demands our moral compromise, since we know that A) the malicious scofflaws in question will almost always fail, and B) we will hope they succeed anyway, because heists are so much crazy calculus and hard work, and because Fuck the Man. Of course that compromise has been compromised: Traditionally, it was baked into the genre’s DNA that even the most comic or high-spirited heist must eventually spiral out of control and end badly. Entropic collapse, and its attendant comeuppance for the crooks who thought they were smarter than the average bear, was essential. Today, largely thanks to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies, heist plots often afflict evil billionaires and benefit lovable rogue crooks. The genre’s logic has eaten its own tail.
Reality doesn’t always write great genre screenplays.
Not that director Frederik Louis Hviid’s movie gives us much reason to think the nitwits and goons that take up a second cash-grab, during the financial meltdown of 2008, will win the day. There’s plenty of entropy, maybe too much. Initially, there’s an attempt to weave a multi-POV fabric, like a mini-me of Michael Mann’s Heat, but primarily we’re supposed to ally with Kasper (Gustav Giese), a failed boxer with a conspicuous facial scar who’s recruited by the first heist’s slimy boss (Reda Kateb), to hit a cash-relay hub. Kasper has a patient wife and adorable little daughter, so we’re meant to root for him, but Geise is a muscly shark of a man, and blends in all too well with the other lowlifes zooming around in stolen cars and facing each other down with glowering tension. (The title apparently refers to unmarked bills, not uncommunicative criminals.)
The movie feels tight and real, like early films by fellow Dane Nicolas Winding Refn (thinking of the Pusher trilogy, 1996-2005), but its threads get lost quickly and often. The one thing films like this require is narrative and visual clarity — we need to grok the clockwork of what the scumbags are trying to do. Hviid apparently followed the actual 2008 case closely, and its sudden starts and stops, plan changes and fuck-ups, are far from clear. Once we’re in the thick of the steal, you can’t tell one masked asshole from the next; I could’ve sworn they’d packed up the last cash bag, as the cops coalesce somewhere outside, three or more times. Key moments, including exploding through a stubborn cement wall, are simply left out. (Whole aspects of the ill-explained heist in a day and age of ubiquitous surveillance, including the ease in which any human could identify the semi-fictionalized Kasper and his big Y-shaped movie-scar, strain credulity.) Reality doesn’t always write great genre screenplays, and Hviid’s film ends up feeling as harried and half-assed as the heisters.
Let’s say the denouement, then, is a little surprising, which can at least get you thinking that maybe a Danish TV true-crime docu-series will clear up what actually happened and how. Hviid’s film opts instead for tough-guy posturing, frenzied camerawork, and storytelling shortcuts. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.