philosoraptor42

Pusher (2012)

I was intrigued by this remake of Pusher. Admittedly I'm a big fan of the Pusher series. It has a strong appeal for me, even if I didn't feel inclined to give any of the entries an A+ score. However, the first movie in the trilogy is definitely not the best. It's not until the sequels, each of which has a different protagonist, that the world of those films expanded with side-characters often returning and the audience becoming more familiar with how the characters relate to one another.

Screencap from the original 1996 movie. The guy on the left?
Mads Mikkelsen! (From "A Royal Affair", "Casino Royale" and
the recent "Hannibal" tv series.)

The original Pusher is a pretty simple story. A drug dealer in Denmark has retirement plans and is look forward to pulling off a big score and possibly finishing with drug dealing for good. He wants a better life for both him and his girlfriend who currently works as a dancer in a club. He thinks of himself as a more sensible drug dealer and a good businessman. Unfortunately, he's not immune from hiccups and so when things start to go wrong he's left unsure as to what to do next. The remake is basically the exact same movie only set in London.

A few factors that made me less horrified to see the original remade were as follows. First of all Nicolas Winding Refn stayed on as producer. Now initially when I saw his name in big letters on the poster, I was annoyed. It seemed like the film was trying to cash in on the recent buzz for Drive by pretending that Nicolas Winding Ren was the director. But it seems that he was directly linked to the movie and what clearer evidence is there of this than the return of Zlato Buric as the (presumably Russian) drug lord Milo. This was a very welcome decision and Buric plays the character fantastically in both versions of "Pusher".

I was a little unsure on Richard Coyle in the lead role. I like Richard Coyle a lot but I've only really enjoyed him in comedy roles. The role I know him for most is as the socially inept and pervertedly philosophical Jeff from Stephen Moffat's tv series "Coupling". I also thought he was really good in the live action adaptation of Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal". But in more serious roles? He's never really had be sold so far. But heck, this might still have been the one to convince me.

Another intriguing aspect to this remake was that apparently the style imitated that of Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" with distinctive trance music and dazzling lighting effects. The original movie was essentially copying Quentin Tarantino's style in Pulp Fiction and had quite a dingy down-to-earth feel. Unfortunately this attempt at imitating "Drive"'s style was a big let down. There are admittedly some rather neat effects using light and colour, but they don't build up an atmosphere like they did in "Drive". Instead it feels like the cinematographer is showing off for the sake of it, as if to make this movie a showcase for rather less haphazard work elsewhere.

The idea that soundtrack would be up there with "Drive" was perhaps a little naive. Still, the attempts to ape the style of "Drive" made it all the more obvious how boring and cheesy the trance music was. Perhaps I wouldn't have found it so distracting if it hadn't been made a selling point from the start. (Videos featuring songs from each of the soundtracks can be found at the end of this review.)

Perhaps one of the most original and surprising aspects of the original "Pusher", though perhaps also one of the most irritating, is the ending. Now I'm not going to give away the ending here. I always try to keep my reviews spoiler free. But I will reveal that the ending is very sudden and jarring. In the remake they've decided to make the ending less sudden and less jarring, but the result is that it makes the ending for too on-the-nose. The new ending makes the protagonist come across as an idiot during that final scene and that really wasn't necessary. I wonder whether they wouldn't have been better off sticking with the original quick and jarring ending rather than spelling things out more slowly.

That's pretty much the problem with the film as a whole. Everything is spelled out so clearly, yet we're missing the grittiness from the first time around. The attempts to be stylish work against the atmosphere of the movie, making it feel like it is trying to be 'trendy' in a way that I found quite alienating. And as much as I love Richard Coyle's comedy roles, I just couldn't believe in him as a drug dealer.

One scene which was particularly hard for me to accept was a scene with a fist fight in a nightclub. The suggestion seems to be that the bouncers have been bought off, but the club just did not look dingy enough for me to believe that anyone would turn a blind eye to a fist fight there. It would be bad for business if the bouncers were seen not to act.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that "Pusher" isn't its own movie. It's a redo of a movie that had a very different sort of setting. Perhaps it's not surprising then, that only the drug lord Milo really feels like he fits in comfortably. The further Richard Coyle gets from Milo's place, the less convincing the film becomes. I felt Paul Kaye (another actor more commonly associated with comedy) felt particularly out of place. On the other hand, Neil Maskell, who is making a name for himself in films like "Kill List", "Wild Bill" and the tv series "Utopia", as a tough-guy-with-nuance, did a great job in his role as the potential buyer Marlon towards the beginning of the movie.

Pusher has some promising elements, but lacks chemistry in so many ways.

D+

Drive soundtrack:
(video link -embedding disabled)

Pusher soundtrack:

(video link)

My reviews for the original Pusher series:
Pusher (1996)
Pusher II (2004)
Pusher 3 (2005)