To be fair, this portentous adaptation of Guillou's self-aggrandizing autobiography is good for quite a few laughs. There were many scenes where some awkward line of dialogue, combined with the clichéd characters and overly dramatic score made me double with laughter. But as a phenomenon this movie and the novel it is based on is anything but funny.
Basically, it is classic action hero stuff: it is all about showing us what a superior human being the protagonist is. He is put to a variety of tests that only serve to showcase his superhuman powers.
All Jan Guillou's fiction, from Ondskan to Arn, is variations on this theme, and the protagonists always have striking similarities to the writer himself. Most of the time his writing is quite entertaining, with lots of well-researched facts about weapons and Middle- Eastern politics thrown in for good measure.
However, this adolescent power-fantasy clashes quite badly with the realistic and mundane setting of Ondskan.
For instance, there is in the novel a storyline where Erik wears a ski-mask, vigilante style, in order to beat up his opponents without being identified. That is of course quite unrealistic -- in reality, he would be as easily identified in a ski-mask as without one.
The absurdity of it would be apparent in a movie, but in a written text it is easier to make the reader accept far-fetched events and a twisted perspective. We share Erik's view of himself as some lone avenger taking on a gangster syndicate.
In the movie, the ski-mask story is gone, but I still find it hard not to see things from a sober, civilized perspective: this is a story about some very disturbed children in a very inhumane system, but the most disturbed of them all is Erik himself. A fifteen-year old with Erik Ponti's pain-resistance and brutality is obviously mentally ill.
This is the real story of Ondskan: how an abused child turns into a monster. That, and the bad fit between Erik's view of himself and the actual reality could have been material for quite an interesting movie. Instead, we get the usual psychopath-as-role-model Hollywood fare, only slower, less fun and more hypocritical.
That the novel has been almost compulsory reading for Swedish schoolchildren for so many years is nothing less than terrifying.
Basically, it is classic action hero stuff: it is all about showing us what a superior human being the protagonist is. He is put to a variety of tests that only serve to showcase his superhuman powers.
All Jan Guillou's fiction, from Ondskan to Arn, is variations on this theme, and the protagonists always have striking similarities to the writer himself. Most of the time his writing is quite entertaining, with lots of well-researched facts about weapons and Middle- Eastern politics thrown in for good measure.
However, this adolescent power-fantasy clashes quite badly with the realistic and mundane setting of Ondskan.
For instance, there is in the novel a storyline where Erik wears a ski-mask, vigilante style, in order to beat up his opponents without being identified. That is of course quite unrealistic -- in reality, he would be as easily identified in a ski-mask as without one.
The absurdity of it would be apparent in a movie, but in a written text it is easier to make the reader accept far-fetched events and a twisted perspective. We share Erik's view of himself as some lone avenger taking on a gangster syndicate.
In the movie, the ski-mask story is gone, but I still find it hard not to see things from a sober, civilized perspective: this is a story about some very disturbed children in a very inhumane system, but the most disturbed of them all is Erik himself. A fifteen-year old with Erik Ponti's pain-resistance and brutality is obviously mentally ill.
This is the real story of Ondskan: how an abused child turns into a monster. That, and the bad fit between Erik's view of himself and the actual reality could have been material for quite an interesting movie. Instead, we get the usual psychopath-as-role-model Hollywood fare, only slower, less fun and more hypocritical.
That the novel has been almost compulsory reading for Swedish schoolchildren for so many years is nothing less than terrifying.