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100Easy Money may well be the crime film of the year, or the decade.
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100Easy Money is not merely an early-career curiosity. It's one of the best underworld films I've seen in years, and Kinnaman gives a fantastic performance in it.
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90Easy Money's big heist scene is the only action set piece so far this year that was so suspenseful I could feel my heartbeat in my ears.
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90This jazzy crime melodrama is engrossing and exhilarating because of Espinosa's impressive command of a wide range of filmmaking skills.
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88One of the most involving of the many first-rate thrillers that have come recently from Scandinavia.
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88An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.
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83Swims forward with tenacious shark-like energy and therefore is sleek, efficient and utterly engaging.
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83Character is action, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. It certainly is here.
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83While overlong and occasionally too reliant on a formulaic set of motives to drive the action forward, Easy Money retains its suave composure right through the engrossing finale.
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80Well acted and acutely observed, the film doesn't try to be a conventionally satisfying coke-land action film.
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80In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.
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75What really distinguishes it from any number of drug-escapade stories is the unusual and welcome sense of Dostoyevskian moral gravity of the narrative.
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Aug 9, 201275The story and cinematography are gritty, but the portraits of these characters are impressively human.
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75In some ways Easy Money recalls Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." They have drug dealing in common, of course, but also a sense of constant swirl and density of onscreen population.
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75So sobering an example of why crime doesn't pay that it could be shown to petty drug thugs to scare them straight.
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70JW is played brilliantly by Joel Kinnaman, who is familiar to American audiences of "The Killing" on AMC.
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70A class-conscious Scandinavian crime film whose impact is dulled by some extraneous subplots, Daniél Espinosa's Easy Money nevertheless makes a solid vehicle for Joel Kinnaman.
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70A hit in its native Sweden as "Snabba Cash," the English title is a piece of cheap irony; this is a crime thriller where no one gets away clean, and every action has its irrevocable reaction.
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Jul 10, 201270Maria Karlsson's multilayered screenplay makes the film much more than just a crime thriller, beautifully incorporating themes of parents and children, misplaced values, and greed and corruption.
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63Although this Swedish vehicle is thoughtfully engineered and has some vivid streaks of color, it could use a jump start to escape the vanilla ice.
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63Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."
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Jul 10, 201263The humanization of these antiheroic outlaws doesn't feel forced, but it does feel engineered, and there's never a viewer investment to match the story's wide expanse.
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60There's plenty here to show why director Daniel Espinosa caught Hollywood's eye, even if this pre-Safe House crime drama holds few surprises.
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60It's obvious from Easy Money why Espinosa would be going places. So long as he takes Kinnaman with him, the gentleman can have our hard-earned cash.
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50Easy Money takes its time telling us how all the fortunes of all three men intersect, and the movie's failing - or at least its significant imperfection - is that when the stories and lifelines do converge, the results just aren't satisfying.
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Jul 10, 201250Betrayals will occur and loyalties will be tested, but it's the audience that ends up ripped off.