JOHAN FALK-SERIES PART 3: THE THIRD WAVE (2003)

Whereas Executive Protection dealt with the possibility of foreign mafias operating and penetrating Swedish borders, The Third Wave is much more high concept. The tagline for the film is "A continent is about to be stolen" pretty much sums it up. Apparently the term  Third Wave itself refers to the possiblility of how fascism can arise (democracy takes pride in individualism, but is harmful for the common good is an argument) and part of that is integrated in the third Johan Falk story.

Johan Falk has retired. He has this great bad ass monologue about how he does not believe in the democratic justice sytem anymore and intend to build a heavily fortified home for his family and the first asshole to come through will be shot on sight. Here we see a different Falk at work. Already he operated out of the system in the second film, but he did contact the police at the end. Here he seems much more disconnected from the system, it is almost postapocalyptic so. He is not concerned of how organised crime slowely infiltrate the european community, slowely corrupting the system until a personal death affects him. Then shit is on and he is hunting down the people behind it and in the process a huge cogwheel in european organised crime.

The villain this time should be recognised by an international audience. It is the same guy who played Göring in Inglorious Basterds : Sylvester Grothe. to be honest though, he is just a henchman to the powers that be, the suits. But he is still great and sleazy.

Shit is going down in Europe and Falk has to save the day

As previous review, I do not want to spoil the plot, it is much more international in scope, has a bigger international cast and a heavilier use of english dialogue. Unfortunately one of the films biggest gripes I have with it is just the english dialogue. Why could not the british actors  complain about some of the most obvious mistranslatings and point it out to the director and rectify it? Very poor indeed and it is just too bad that an otherwise narratively and such cinematic strong thriller would hinder at poor dialogue.

Otherwise it is very interesting how the series has progressed from an fantastically swedishly imagined copthriller to a more broad international thriller with higher stakes, I think this is where the creator Anders Nilssson intended the series to end, but then real  things happened in Swqeden and  more films were to come.

I have yet to spoken about the soundtrack to these fil,ms, but Bengt Nilsson is the genius behind them and are available on Spotify. They contribute so much to the films you need to acknowledge its presence:

Bengt Nilsson