Sweden’s “Easy Money,” released here in 2012, was a stylish, exciting gangster thriller whose star and director were immediately snapped up by Hollywood: Joel Kinnaman is now starring in the “RoboCop” remake, while Daniel Espinosa went on to direct the hit “Safe House.”
In the second film in the trilogy, Kinnaman (who also stars in AMC’s “The Killing”) is back with an equally attention-getting new director, Babak Najafi. This time, JW (Kinnaman) is an inmate about to earn a temporary release from prison, where he has struck up a friendship with the Serbian fellow hood Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic) he shot and crippled in the first film. JW, his old friend Mahmoud (Fares Fares) from his cab-driving days, and a Chilean drug smuggler (Matias Padin Varela) are all after a bag of money claimed by a drug lord.
Najafi stages action scenes with an intense, queasy beauty and elevates what is in its outlines a routine crime drama to near-operatic proportions, drawing painstaking connections among the dilemmas of the characters and tying each of them into family dramas (in successive scenes, each of the three principals calls his mother). There are, in the “Easy Money” films, many sides to even ruthless and lethal men; the moral of their anguished story is how easy it is to tumble into the abyss after beginning one’s crime career with a tentative step into questionable behavior.