Critics reviews

Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen endows the slapstick with a wry sense of fatalism—the handheld camera rarely rests during Men & Chicken, but the film still manages to evoke, in its more grotesquely fanciful moments, the jaundiced entropy of a Roy Andersson tableau... Men & Chicken might require a relatively high tolerance for zaniness, but it's nonetheless an undeniably clever piece of work.

Men & Chicken does have some exceptionally choreographed scenes of slapstick and farce, styles of cinematic humor more universal than the distinctively dark Danish variety. The Three Stooges and the Keystone Cops are such obvious models that they border on homage... Yet the inappropriate, irreverent jokes and actions, which elevate bad taste to an aesthetic more polished than anything by John Waters, set the tone and steal the show.

Alas, [Mikkelsen's] performance is this black comedy's only point of interest. The film is grotesque and bizarre without ever really being funny, and while the sight of Mikkelsen as a nebbishy loser is initially bracing, the novelty wears off fast, leaving little else.

All the weirdness is orchestrated with surprising understatement by the writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen, a well-established screenwriter and a bit of a cult figure, directorially, in his native land. The movie's grave commitment to its own quirkiness is admirable, I suppose. But that doesn't mean I'm going to recommend it.

If you've ever wondered how it is that so few comedies are exported from Denmark, which consistently ranks as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on the planet, Anders Thomas Jensen's Men & Chicken's pitch-black sense of humor — the kind you laugh at only to break the tension — may provide a clue.

It's an admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination. The jokes dry up somewhere in the second half of the film, leaving a mystery with an answer that's telegraphed far ahead of its reveal, stranding the characters with little to do.

Not only Anders Thomas Jensen's best directorial effort by a country mile (faint praise, that), but far more satisfying than many of his scenarios for other, better directors, Men & Chicken is a black comedy about extreme family dysfunction. What begins as a kind of odd-couple brothers' tale soon goes way off the rails.