Rööperi, 3 stars

Saw Aleksi Mäkelä’s Rööperi, and wasn’t too impressed.

Even though the film manages to evoke a sixties/seventies-atmosphere, and the plot entertainingly slaloms between hard-boiled criminals and their mishaps, it feels somehow stale.

Part of the blame falls on casting – the movie is packed to the gills with Solar Films regulars. Peter Franzen has been praised for his role as Crisu, the quota junkie of the bunch, but it’s actually Samuli Edelmann who takes the top honors in this film. Where Crisu is pretty much an one-dimensional creature of habit, Edelmann’s porn emperor has a lot more flesh on its bones. Jasper Pääkkönen has a terrible role as the new kid on the block – his skills are nowhere close to escaping the caricature that has been scripted for his character.

Helsinki is alternately pretty and ugly – apart from a few precision-done era-establishing shots the cinematography is on the lazy side. Inside shots are just so much easier to control than wholesale aging of a neighbourhood. Period music, which could easily have been used to anthemize a scene or two, is very sparingly used as well. The language, with its monotonic swearing, seems a bit out of place as well.

Not bad by any means, but I think the non-fiction books by Tom Sjöberg and Harri Nykänen the movie is based on do provide a lot more entertainment than this ninety minutes of stalling fennogangsta-flick.