The Age Review - At World's End

The Age, August 8th, 2010

A Danish/German/Australian co-production, largely shot in the Queensland rainforests, At World's End is an adventure yarn that travels to exotic places with its eyebrows mischievously raised and its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. Mostly. This is the kind of film usually churned out by Hollywood (Romancing the Stone, Welcome to the Jungle) rather than smaller national cinemas, which are usually wary about competing with American studios in the genres that, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, they've made their own. However, directed by former actor Tomas Villum Jensen and written by Anders Thomas Jensen (who worked with Susanne Bier on films such as After the Wedding, Open Hearts and Brothers), At World's End has done well enough at this Scandinavian box office to suggest to local distributors that there might be a market for it here.

The Australian connection would appear to have played a part in this, although - aside from an amusing cameo by Bille Brown at the start, as a TV naturalist whose whispered wonderments and general demeanour have more than a little in common with David Attenborough - there's little evidence of it on-screen. Seasoned by a wacky black sense of humour, the film follows the exploits of its unlikely hero (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a goofy psychologist employed by the Danish Prison Services who would be at home in a screwball comedy. With his long-suffering assistant (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen), he's been sent on an official mission to Jakarta where a Danish citizen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has been arrested for murder and faces the death penalty. The chief complicating factor is that, while the accused man looks to be in his 30s, he's claiming to be 129 years old, his apparent youthfulness, he says, the result of a diet that includes the leaves of a rare plant that appears to be a floral equivalent of the legendary fountain of youth. The three find themselves fleeing through the jungle with the police and some mobsters (whose Mr Big is played by Steven Berkolf) in hot pursuit. The mess they get themselves into has a dark side, but it's mostly a hoot.

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