Butler's Cinema Scene

Ethan Hawke, Noomi Rapace

“STOCKHOLM” My rating: B- 

92 minutes | MPAA rating: R

On a sunny day in 1973 a man wearing a ridiculous disguise — black leather jacket with a Texas flag on the back, cowboy boots and hat, long-haired wig and sunglasses — walks into a Stockholm bank, pulls a machine gun from his bag, has everyone lie down and tunes a portable radio to a Bob Dylan song.

So begins Robert Budreau’s “Stockholm,” a riff on a real 1973 incident in which a couple of not-terribly-bright lowlifes held a handful of bank employees hostage for several days before finally being overwhelmed by the cops.  To survive their ordeal the hostages bonded with their captors…a situation now described by the term “Stockholm syndrome.”

The idiot in the cowboy getup is Kaj, and he’s portrayed by Ethan Hawke with a curious sort of dim-bulb charisma. Waffling between cockiness and panic, he demands that the authorities free his best bud Gunnar (Mark Strong) from prison and deliver him to the bank.

Kai also wants $1 million and a Ford Mustang getaway car…he specifies that it be just like the one Steve McQueen drove in ” Bullitt.”

Kai (whose real name is Lars) isn’t really a bad guy…at least not one who’d kill hostages. Which is why the captives, especially a teller named Bianca (Noomi Rapace), end up siding with him, particularly once they realize that the police chief in charge of negotiations (Christopher Heyerdahl) is an asshole careerist who would sacrifice innocents in a crossfire if it meant grabbing a few glorious headlines.

Though it sticks to the basic outline of real-life events, Bureau’s screenplay takes several fanciful turns, including a Kai-Bianca romance consummated in the safety deposit vault. Small wonder the names have been changed to protect the real participants.

In its final minutes, “Stockholm” generates some effective tension as the authorities drill into the vault where the crooks are making a last stand and pump in noxious gas.

Yet most of the film unfolds in a sort of middling space, stranded between serious crime and unlikely silliness.  The performances are generally good, and it’s always fun to see Hawke in slack-jawed moron mode, but ultimately “Stockholm” reminds of how much better a picture the similarly-themed “Dog Day Afternoon” was.

| Robert W. Butler