When it comes to booking a relaxing getaway, nothing can beat a seaside cottage in Scotland.
01.09.2023 - 14:03 / variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Promised Land” deserves a sexier title than “The Promised Land”: It’s hard to hear those well-worn words and not expect something as beige and starchy as the spuds grown on its titular terrain. It has one, in fact.
The native Danish title for Nikolaj Arcel’s film translates as “The Bastard” — which has the advantage of applying, in different senses, to both its male principals, and rather better captures the spirit of this lavishly upholstered historical romp, which may pose nobly at points, but gradually reveals a heart of pure boys’-own hokum. Notionally rooted in historical fact, but embellished with storybook romance and flouncing cartoon villainy, this roundly enjoyable Venice competition entry finally owes all its residual gravitas (and at least half its considerable handsomeness) to the expressive woodcut visage of one Mads Mikkelsen.
Funny thing about that face, with its razored planes and coolly sloping brows: It’s one that Hollywood deems suitable only for the most acrid of bad guys, from the dapper young Hannibal Lecter to the time-traveling Nazi of the last “Indiana Jones” effort, whereas on home turf, the Dane gets to be the very picture of honorable alpha masculinity. That’s certainly the case here, where Mikkelsen plays the real-life 18th-century army captain Ludvig Kahlen, a stoic man’s man of fatherless, dirt-poor origins who defied the usual outlook for boys of his class bracket to rise through the military ranks on the strength of his tenacity and valor.
Perhaps U.S. casting directors would swap him with the soft, puppy-faced Simon Bjenneberg, here a hoot as Kahlen’s irredeemably coal-souled aristocratic nemesis.
Happily, Denmark trusts a sharp, carved angle. Also hard and
.When it comes to booking a relaxing getaway, nothing can beat a seaside cottage in Scotland.
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fired back at an unnamed reporter at the Venice Film Festival on Friday over a question regarding cast diversity in their new film, “The Promised Land.”The movie is set in 1750’s Denmark. Mikkelsen, 57, stars as an army captain struggling to raise his social status and maintain his values in an increasingly hostile climate.
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Mads Mikkelsen has proved time and again a master at playing quiet, rational, and seemingly harmless men who, when pushed, swiftly reveal themselves also to be skilled executioners; their pent-up rage does not bubble up so much as shoot out of them in sudden bursts of ultraviolence. Mikkelsen proves it once more in “The Promised Land,” the new period drama that reunites him with his “A Royal Affair” Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and premieres in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival this week.
They don’t make them like this any more, except when they do. Bastarden (disappointingly renamed The Promised Land in English) is a historical epic out of Denmark that has all the virtues of a midday movie remembered from childhood, the kind of thing you watched when your mother kept you home with a bad cold: a setting sometime in the olden days, a lawless frontier, sword fights and a gaggle of delectably evil baddies. Those seamy aristocrats and their henchmen, given to torturing, murdering and raping their oppressed tenants, are just lining up to have the tables turned, giving them a rich dose of their own torturing, murdering medicine. Hooray!
It’s been 11 years since Mads Mikkelsen starred in Nikolaj Arcel’s Danish period drama A Royal Affair, one of 2012’s most raved about international films which also went on to an Oscar nomination.