Beck 28 - The Family (2015)

Very disappointed :(

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Compared to the other episodes in the series, "The Family" turned out to be a little confusing. It involves the murder of a gangster (Cedomir Djordjevic) who is at first shot at in the street, then killed in cold blood at home. Beck (Peter Haber) and Gunvald (Mikael Persbrandt) uncover a complicated plot involving the gangster's widow Charlotta (Marie Robertson), her father (Björn Andersson) and a dentist who turns out to have a rather shady past. The resolution turns out to be rather complicated and slightly illogical; there are too many set-piece scenes involving the police where information is exchanged very quickly - so quickly, in fact, that it becomes difficult to viewers to grasp what is going on. Nonetheless there are incidental pleasures en route to the denouement. Director Mårten Klingberg focuses more on Gunvald's personal life, as he becomes romantically involved with Charlotta but finds to his cost that business and pleasure do not mix. We also see him becoming highly jealous of computer whizkid Ayda Çetin (Elmira Arikan), who becomes very useful to Beck in solving the case. As a more traditionally- minded cop, believing that cases can only be solved through trudging the streets and visiting suspects, the idea of crimes being solved solely through virtual means is anathema to him.The production also focuses on Beck's personal life as he discovers that his grandson Tomas (Daniel Sjöberg) continues to receive abusive texts from a fellow-learner at school. Unsure as to whether to exercise his authority as a police officer - and thereby incur his daughter's ire - Beck tries to solve the case in a softy-softly manner, but finds to his cost that circumstances are very different from what he anticipated. We also see that pathologist Gunilla (Anu Sinisalo) develops an attraction towards him; at present, however, Beck feels emotionally incapable of responding.BECK is a cut above other detective thrillers in the way it focuses on the protagonists' personal lives, even while showing them solving crimes. What a shame, therefore, that the complications of the plot tended to divert our attention away from the characters.

In the opening scene a man opens fire on another man as he gets out of his car with his family; he returns fire but nobody is hurt. It turns out the target of the attack was a crime boss and this wasn't the first attempt on his life that also endangered his family… he tells them that he has had enough and will abandon the criminal side of his life; it is too late though as he is already in the crosshairs of a sniper and is shot and killed moments later. Given his connections to the crime world is are no shortage of suspects. When a woman is killed in a hit and run incident it appears that her death may be linked to the original crime. While the investigation proceeds Gunvald gets rather close to Charlotta, the dead man's wife.This episode got off to an exciting start and quickly set up an interesting mystery with no shortage of suspects; both as to who the shooter was and who had employed him. The fact that one suspect was using cars to smuggle drugs from the United States was a nice nod to 'The French Connection'. The story progresses at a decent pace and leads to an unexpected, although entirely logical culprit. The closeness between Gunvald and Charlotta is believable portrayed and doesn't detract from the main story; both Mikael Persbrandt and Marie Robertson do well in the roles. Peter Haber does just as well as protagonist Martin Beck; a nicely ordinary policeman. Overall another solid episode.These comments are based on watching the episode in Swedish with English subtitles.