With this film coming out several years after Pusher, giving Nicolas Winding Refn plenty of time to work on it, with basically the same cast as Pusher and apparently a bigger budget, I guess I expected more than this. While Pusher was an impressive and gritty look at the underground of Copenhagen, this is just a slightly unrealistic psychological profile of a loser who finds his wife having a baby to be the final straw. The film is about Leo, who hates almost everything about his life. When he finds himself pushed in the background for the baby his wife is to give birth to soon, he flips out and sets a load of bad stuff coming his way in motion. The plot is pretty good, I guess, but it just didn't seem as good as the plot of Pusher. The pacing is fair, but the film too often seems to stand still. The acting was mostly great. The characters are somewhat interesting and credible, but they were too underdeveloped(even more so than those of Pusher), so we rarely understand why they do what they do. The score is great, though it is overly noisy and annoying at times, most of the time it fits in well with the character were watching and his or her state of mind. The cinematography is less interesting and involving than that of Pusher. Less movement, and when there finally is movement, it seems off. The directorial style of Pusher is still there, and this is what makes the film enjoyable and watchable. However, too much time is spent wondering why him or her is doing this and that, and in the end I found that even with a fair bit of analyzing, I can't make heads or tails of the film. I don't know... maybe my expectations were too high. I recommend this to very big fans of director Nicolas W. Refn and/or Pusher. 7/10
Review of Bleeder
