Uro (2006)

Wonderful Movie

To me, this movie is perfection.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kind of authentic environment in this movie, like taken from reality. Bjørn Floberg is just raw power as the gangster boss. The last 20 minutes are hot suspense, if you can handle something quite special other than typical Hollywood.Uro means "unrestfulness" and on the cover photo is Uropolitiet = the riot Police.

I recently saw this at the 2007 Palm Springs International Film Festival. The story is by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg who previously wrote the internationally popular film Hawaii, Oslo. This crime drama out of Norway is about a rouge undercover cop comes from a home who's mother is an alcoholic and father has committed suicide but with determination to make something out of himself he has recently graduated from the police academy and has gone into the URO narcotics unit as a rookie working undercover. His failure to follow rules of procedure and his aggressive tactics bring him scorn and punishment from within his department. He also finds himself in the drug dealing underworld of a friend he's known since childhood. It's a good premise for a crime drama and the story moves along well with interesting characters but it's a little far-fetched and simplistic too. Nicolai Cleve Broch stars. A fairly impressive debut feature film by it's director Stefan Faldbakken. It's worth checking out and I would give it a 7.5 out of 10.

All though this story is interesting in itself, the underlying emotional aspect is not given enough weight. Unfortunately the script is not good enough to make us understand, or at least care, about HP's bad and confusing choices during this 104 minutes. He makes weird and stupid decisions over and over again and it is just irritating...! The inter-human relations in this story are in addition badly reproduced. HP and Makker, HP and Mette, HP and Marco, HP and his dead father... We don't get the feeling that he is close to any of them, and yet their relation is supposed to mean more than what the film is able to express. Another thing that is weird, are scenes where people start shouting to each other without any obvious reason... People can get "caught in the moment" and engaged in a discussion of course, but two men yelling at each other in a block-apartment still seems weird when you see it on-screen. Difficult to explain, it just seemed a bit... "off". The action scenes is not at all bad. Norwegian film is definitely improving on this aspect. Nicolai Cleve Broch is a great actor, and he is convincing in his role as HP, but his character is not nuanced enough. I blame the script, cause he has already proved that he can manage this ambivalence in "Uno". Ane Dahl Torp is okay as Mette, but doesn't give much extra to the film. Ahmed Zeyan as Marco is also okay, but none of them "blows me away". Ingar Helge Gimle as "Makker" is all wrong!

Uro is the story of the police officer Hans Petter (HP), who is both troubled by his past and overeager to "do the right thing". HP soon finds himself in a world of trouble as he goes to far to make a bust on a local drug-lord.HP's troubled background consists of the typical "alcoholic mother,absent father" setting, and HP himself is regarded as a troublemaker by people who knew him when he was young. The only "bad" thing we get to know about HP is that he punched one of his teachers in the face and then took off to another town. And in this lays some of the problem with the film. Although the movie tries to portray HP as a troublemaker who ignores the rules and his comrades because he believes it's the right thing to do, it only makes him look like part party-boy,part emo-kid. It also makes him look incredible stupid since he'd probably get permission to do what he's doing IF he'd told his superiors, and makes us wonder how he could ever get into the police academy (the real one, not the movie one).The other problems is that the scenes never take this movie to the next level. The sad parts aren't really that sad, the gritty part's aren't that gritty and the funny parts.. well, there aren't really any funny parts. It might have saved the film if HP had walloped in sin and drugs. He takes a few shots of cocaine and have sex with the drug lords drug addicted daughter, but that's about it. The movie tries to be black and grim but ends up gray and flat.The paradox of the movie is that the acting is pretty good, but the film is not. Nicolai Cleve Broch makes a good effort with HP's limited character and both Ane Dahl Torp and Ahmed Zeyan does solid performances. The best portrayed character is by Ingar Helge Gimle as "Makker", HP's boss. Whereas HP is gray and lifeless, Makker is full of emotion and life. You can really feel his frustration when HP doesn't follow his plan for him.To sum this up I say good acting, poor camera and scriptwriting. A total of 5 out of 10 stars.