Title: A Second Chance
Director: Susanne Bier
Starring: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Maria Bonnevie, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lykke May Anderson
Susanne Bier casts Nikolaj Coster-Waldau – of whom we became fond of in ‘Game of Thrones’ – to play a veteran police officer with a wife and new baby, who makes a fateful decision.
The Academy Award-winning director, has the magic touch of a puppeteer in directing her actors to authenticity. But this time she has failed in the selection of the script, written by Anders Thomas Jensen. We know from the very beginning what is coming, since we are nurtured along the way by a symmetry of circumstances, with contrasting behaviours. But once the die is cast the entire melodrama reaches peaks of absurdity, sugar-coated with a politically correct finale. Whereas it would have been more gratifying to have a ‘Match Point’ twist.
The Danish thriller, raises the question of how far one should go with a child in distress, and to what extent it is legitimate to fulfil your own desire, if you are offering a better life to the suffering infant. At what point does tragedy blur the line between just and unjust? This is what ‘A Second Chance’ is all about.
Despite the theme is incredibly intriguing and empathic, the way the story is structured is utterly disappointing. The audience gets deceived into rationalising the protagonist’s extreme act, to the point of hoping he’ll get away with it. Then the entire situation goes downhill when events and characters put him on the stand, for what he did. All in all, the contrived emotional manipulations delude expectations of what potentially started as a controversial loud statement, that bends back in fear of conventions.
Technical: B
Acting: B
Story: F
Overall: F
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
