Black Crab – A Review

You’ve heard of Disney on Ice? Well this is Apocalypse Now on Ice! That’s how I imagine Black Crab, a Swedish action thriller now available on Netflix, was initially pitched. A ragtag group of soldiers must go on a suicide mission that involves crossing a frozen archipelago. The twist? They’re on ice skates. Had I been the one deciding whether to produce this movie or not I probably would have said no. Sounds like it could veer into BMX Bandits territory. But I would have been very wrong. The skating scenes save this movie from being a very competent but forgettable post-apocalyptic war story.

Noomi Rapace (Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Prometheus), proving she’s a bonafide action star with an intense convincing performance, plays Caroline, a mother pressed into military service after civil war erupts in Sweden. An opening flashback shows her losing her daughter to armed men in a crammed traffic tunnel, the film’s first wave of violence in a relentlessly grim progression of barbed wire fences, hanged deserters, starving people, and buildings with holes blown through them. Relentlessly grim until I laughed first hearing about the skating that is.

Caroline quickly shows her combat skills, stabbing and shooting her way through an angry mob, before arriving at a military base to receive her orders. If she and five other soldiers can safely skate across 100 nautical miles of frozen seawater to a military laboratory and deliver some mysterious cargo, they might just turn the tide of a hopeless war against combatants known only as “the enemy”. Caroline agrees to the mission when shown a photo of her daughter still alive in a refugee camp. She still has hope to be reunited.

But do these hardened soldiers have any hope on the ice? It’s unclear whether this group was chosen for any particular skill at skating. One soldier is established as a huge hockey fan, but the group’s on ice grace doesn’t always inspire confidence since many of the actors had to learn to skate for the movie. After escaping their base being destroyed, they start their mission by forming a “Flying V” straight out of The Mighty Ducks.

Despite any of the cast’s skating inexperience, the scenes filmed on actual frozen lakes at both dusk and dawn are spectacular. Director Adam Berg only shot certain important set pieces on soundstages with the actors wearing rollerblades, and it shows. The unique visuals on the frozen water alone make this film worth seeing.

Berg piles on the tension throughout, although it is difficult to get to know these mostly ill-defined stock characters. When the moral ambiguity of their mission became apparent, I didn’t care, I just wanted to see more skating.  I loved seeing one soldier comically trip over a literal sea of frozen corpses. Or the death hanging over the undeniable leisurely way our heroes glided across the ice at times.

In the final third of the film, all the skating is done and it is deeply missed. The movie loses all its fun before a comically violent climactic death and cheesy final scene. You gave me something I didn’t know I wanted (lots of skating) and then took it away (the skating). So yes I have experienced deep loss and am now qualified  to judge the serene conclusion of Caroline’s mother-daughter relationship as cheesy.

The emotional core of the movie is told through flashbacks, interrupting the action and never truly resonating. All the attempts at humanising the characters are undercut by the brutally efficient pace of the film. Any unique personal revelation (e.g. one character’s surprising affinity for Swedish furniture design) seems plopped in just so we can maybe care about that person’s death moments later.

That hollowness of the world building and character development may be the best thing for Black Crab though. Fleshing out the story would distract from the two elements that really work: perfectly done action sequences and ice skating. Overall the scenes on ice are a major accomplishment that make this movie uniquely memorable and well worth your time. Black Crab seemed like a weird idea to me at first but worked better than I could have imagined. It disarmed me and scuttled sideways into my heart.