Burning

maeland 🫠2.5

«Nybakken har dævva» «HÆ»

Nick Langdon2.5

Time to add another entry to my list of the unofficial Fast & Furious extended universe with 2014's Burnout, or Børning: The Fast & The Fønniest in the original Norwegian. That's right, we're heading for the arctic circle, at speed, with mostly the same mix of American muscle cars and Japanese imports, only with hilariously cringe Norwegian rock and rap on the soundtrack. There's these two guys, our protagonist Roy and a dude maybe named after one of Audi's worst cars, TT and they have some kind of rivalry. In the opening scene they have a race, our protagonist loses, crashes his car and goes to prison. Cut to 14 years later and in the same week where he has to look after his teenage daughter while his ex-wife jets off on holiday with her new rich husband, he gets challenged to a race for honour by that same douchebag from 14 years prior. Will he finally win and reclaim a non-existent title as the best driver in Norway? Will he bond with his estranged child along the way as they have to work together? Will there be some other random people along for the trip that viewers will struggle to care about? Oh yes indeed. There's attempts at humour, very few of which generate even a snort, there's some extremely obvious drama that is in no way earned, and a surprising level of low key racism, but mostly against Swedes. Weirdly the actor playing Roy, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, I recently saw in In Order of Disappearance, the only other Norwegian film I've watched, which was also released in 2014.Actually a far bigger influence on Børning would probably be both the idea of the cannonball run illegal race across the United States, and the movie very, very loosely based on said race, The Cannonball Run (1980). There's also large doses of Smokey and the Bandit (1977), particularly in the one determined police captain who wants to arrest everyone. Both comparisons are apposite as the film is actually dedicated to Hal Needham who died in 2013, and his work is about the level of quality one should expect here. So it's now just a question of who will be the fastest from the suburbs of Oslo to the very top of Norway, some 2000km away by the twisting roads that the country's geography engenders. This natural beauty of the landscape was the principal attraction for one of the competitors, and that is quite nice to look at, gives a break from all the antics on the road that you know won't really matter in the end because it's not like the bad guy with his Japanese drift machine (not the vehicle for long distance driving, but then again nor is Roy's drag racer) was going to ever win. So it's not that good, I mean it's better than another movie about illegal motorsport, the same year's Need for Speed (2014), but that's not saying much. And finally, despite the above mentioned casual racism, in 2023 this film was remade in Sweden, and there are also two sequels, none of which I'm particularly excited to track down. How's my old mate Dominic Toretto doing?

MILESLY3.5

I don't understand Norwegian. Fortunately the sound of a small block V8 is universal.