Maybe it's time we stop taking Mads Mikkelsen so seriously? It's
hard to reconcile the brooding, anguished Danish actor from The Hunt, After the Wedding, and more
with the erratic oddball he plays in the absurd and disgusting Men
& Chicken. With a frock of curly hair and a mustache that screams
"sexual predator", he plays Elias, the relentlessly masculine,
perpetually masturbating brother to Gabriel (David Dencik), who is no prize
himself. With their jacked up noses and unavoidable hair-lips, they look like a
mad scientist's rejected experiments, and as it turns out their unique features
are a family trait.
Writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen,
a staple of the Dogme 95 movement who has worked with Mikkelsen on much darker
material in the past, veers into absurdist territory that's like something out
of The Three Stooges...but the most twisted Stooges you've ever seen. It's not
a combination that works for very long, but for a while the barrage of wacky
characters and ridiculous occurrences make for a supremely enjoyable ride.
Gabriel has just learned from his recently-deceased father (even his rather
smelly demise is pretty funny) on a hilariously awful home video that he and
Elias were adopted, and that they are only half-brothers. Their real father is
a mysterious man named Evelio Thanatos, who lives on the sparsely
populated island of Ork. When Gabriel calls Elias to tell him the news, he's
busy on a date with a wheelchair-bound therapist who has figured out he only
picked her for free therapy. His denials in the face of the obvious are nearly
worth enduring the entire film for.
Upon arriving in Ork, the brothers
encounter three strange men; Franz (Soren Maling), Josef (Nicolas Bro),
and Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who beat up strangers with giant pots, stuffed
birds, and anything else they can find. It isn't long before they figure out
they all share the same father and are half-brothers, each with a different
mother. Things only get weirder from here, and the film actually benefits from
being as bonkers and free from structure as possible. It's too much fun just
delighting in the silliness of it all. The boys live in a rundown house full of
farm animals, play random pickup games of badminton, and get together at night
for bedtime stories like a bunch of kids. Watching the likes of Mikkelsen,
Maling, and Dencik indulge in this kind of crazy behavior is what Men & Chicken should
have stayed about.
The first half is so good that it's only
matched by the disappointment of the second half when things start getting
weird in a bad way. What had been a twisted good time becomes a gross-out fest
due to some grim revelations about the brothers and their.....relationship to
the animals. Hey, it gets lonely living on a farm with nary a woman in
sight, but what we learn actually goes much deeper than that. Jensen's approach
to this grim discovery is to play it as straight as possible, which if he found
a way to make light of something so heinous it could be tolerated.
Controversial material is nothing new for Jensen and he usually takes it
head-on, but this was the wrong time and the wrong film for him to do it. At that
point it's hard to look at these characters as anything but their most
disgusting traits, and sadly the narrative becomes solely about that one
depressing thing, as well. Not even the admittedly unforgettable sight of
Mikkelsen coddling a sheep can pull Men
& Chicken out of its despair.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
