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That was an excellent one.

A Masterpiece!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Cinematically, Per Fly's film contains all the elements of excellence accompanied by good performances rendered by the cast. Opening sequences signaled that the audience was on board for a good ride, unfortunately the ride ended all too soon. If this was not part of a trilogy I would have walked out after 30 minutes.Scandinavian films are known for quiet story telling which I usually appreciate, but this is just badly paced. That low hum within the soundtrack must have been the sound of paint drying on what could have been a good picture. One would think that four screenwriters could deliver a compelling story-line, maybe therein lies a problem. Considering the high quality of Fly's previous entries in the trilogy ("Bænken" & "Arven") he should have stopped at a duo or hired a objective Editor. Twenty minutes less running time may have provided a tightening and focus necessary to hold our attention. At least it would have made for a better paced film which may have found an international audience. Sadly, Drabet misses the mark of excellence by approximately half a kilometer of footage.

YAWN YAWN YAWN! Ask any so called intellectual movie-critic, and he or she will say that this movie is oh so great. They will say that this movie deals with the dark side of man, with moral dilemmas! That might be true, but at the same time this movie has been seen many times before in Danish movies. Make up something new! Per Fly has been said to be a genius. Yeah well, if a genius is a person who can copy, then he is. The existential themes of this movie is not something new, Kierkegaard and the Sartre (just to mention a few) have written about this a long time ago. And what is up with Charlotte Fich! She is a Drama Queen in this movie. I understand the role she plays, I just don't believe in it. She overdoes it!

The story centers on a social studies high school teacher. Hes married and has been having an affair with a former student. Hes an old communist and the student is a radical, inclined towards hard-line activism. We might perceive him as her ideological father.We learn already in the beginning of the film that the student has taken part in an action against a weapons manufacturer, where a policeman ended up dead somehow. The question is how and why, how to deal with it and what the consequences will be? We follow the teacher as he tries to come to grasp with what has happened. He is dissatisfied with his marriage and finds his safe middle class existence lacking. So he latches on to the wings of his love for the young student, and her convictions, and takes off, on an Icarus ride towards societies boundaries.Its the old 'Crime and Punishment' theme again, set to a Danish middle class and political background. It deals with questions of guilt, romantic love and the meaning of politics. If bombs are killing thousands in Iraq, is it so odd when someone dies in Denmark? Is the main character a thrill seeker, out for the rush of a young woman's love and fiery convictions? Is there any meaning in punishment? How much guilt should one be feeling?The film weeds a tangled web of morality, desires and politics. However, it is not as tangled, or perhaps not as well untangled, as it could have been. The motives for the different actions undertaken are never really elaborated on. Rather the film is often quiet. Perhaps that is part of the point, a low bass-like sound is humming all through the movie, like a constant, gnarling feeling of guilt. But it still feels like something is missing in the character description. We also understand quite soon what direction the plot is taking, the contours are a bit obvious. It is not hard to predict the moral of the story, or the fate of the school teacher, far ahead of time. Still, it is a compelling and thought-provoking film in many ways. The acting is highly believable and we understand the main characters aggression against petite bourgeois existence as well as his loneliness and sadness over losing it. Also Id like to give props to the most explicit hand gliding-Icarus analogy since '24 Hour Party People'. Real good stuff. That should be used in even more films, I think!

Although not a class society in the classical sense, Director Per Fly has depicted the struggles, troubles and worries of the underclass, the middle class and the upper-class of modern Denmark in a trilogy consisting of "Bænken (The Bench)", "Arven (The Inheritance)" and "Drabet (The killing / The murder / The homocide)". While the environments, the surroundings and the living standards of the different classes clearly differ, the true problems that the persons encounter are essentially somewhat the same."Drabet" has the middle class as it's point of departure. A grammar school (or senior high school) teacher lives in Copenhagen together with his Swedish wife. Their son, being as old as the students the father teaches, has moved out with a girlfriend. On the surface everything seems idyllic, but things aren't going well at all. The main character, Carsten, is having an affair with an old student, who is approximately of the same age as his son. Being an old left-wing activist, Carsten's life is given a new meaning with the entrance of this young, leftist girl in his life, but his dual role is pushed to an ultimatum when the girl and two other activists kill a police officer in a hit-and-run after a vandalism action. The three get arrested and Carsten chooses to abandon his "supposed" dull life with his wife in favour of supporting the girl in prison. He begs her not to confess to the police who drove the car in order for her not to be convicted for premeditated murder.From this point on a number of plot twists throws the main character into many moral dilemmas. In pursuit of personal happiness and meaning of life, he realizes (too) late what his actions have had of consequences. When he realizes his mistakes, is it too late for him to turn things around? Can he be redeemed? Can he redeem himself? The style of filming has strong resemblance to the other two films: The mood and dialogue are realistic depicted; There is a focus on emotions through the characters' eyes. The down-to-earth filming is contrasted, but also paralleled, with some 4 dream-like sequences of the main character jumping of a cliff with a parachute, falling, falling with the green land on the one hand and the endless sea on the other - which way will he end? In one sequence his parachute catches fire, but it's only a dream! In the end he lands on the land. But he is all alone.The actors do a great job. It is however, funny if not silly, why the main character has this Swedish speaking wife, as was the case in "Arven", which is probably a requirement from the sponsor, Svensk Filmindustri (SFI) in order to be able to hit wide on the Swedish market as well. Many scenes are so emotional intense that you feel like curling your toes, but the camera has no mercy, it just keeps filming: We have to sit through the long sequence where the wife finds out about the affair, the sequence where the dead police officer's wife screams at the top her voice in court, the sequence where the main character tells an old friend to keep out of his life. The best scenes in the film are the one without dialogue - the silence is so effectful. Kudo to Jesper Christensen for pulling an amazing performance, almost on par with the sublime one he made in "Bænken".Fly's "Drabet" can both be seen as social realism, poking to a middle class in Denmark that Has It All, but forgets how to live life, be happy and protect the true values in life, but also a story of ordinary people put in extreme situations. The film has a nice ambiguous ending, although clearly the most optimistic of the three films. What I particularly like about the film is that it isn't moralizing, but it indeed tells a lot about society and hopefully make us re-evaluate our own lives.The trilogy will be remembered for many years and will hopefully mark a fine start in a long and great film career from director Per Fly.Strongly Recommended; Rating: 8/10