The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

This Swedish offering is about as lighthearted and inconsequential as a dark comedy dealing with mass murder and nihilistic destruction can possibly get. While escaping both the police and a cartoonish biker gang, centenarian Allan Karlsson (50-year-old Robert Gustafsson) flashes back to his youthful discovery of “how good it feels to blow things up,” a proclivity that led him to fateful meetings with Franco, Stalin and Robert Oppenheimer, and into inadvertently becoming the architect of the Cold War. If that's not weird and wacky enough: oompah music! In the flashback scenes, director Felix Herngren seems to be going for a Forrest Gump-like historical fable, but in the more manic present-day scenes, Herngren leans on glib violence and weak screenwriting clichés. It's an unusual ride to say the least, a mouthful of a title and several fistfuls of ideas, often quite inventive and funny, but a little too flippant to fully recommend. D.B.