The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Bloody Well Should Have Disappeared

If it were up to me this would be called ‘The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window, Fell, and Was Never Heard From Again’ as this way we’d be out of the cinema in two minutes flat, no hard feelings. Alternatively, if The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared had actually disappeared, then I could have lived with that. But, no, the 100-year-old is in every frame, more or less, and this is a 100-year-old who will quickly get on your wick, just as the film itself will get on your wick. Based on the Swedish bestseller of the same name, by Jonas Jonasson, it’s a monotonous, one-note caper that will have you wishing: OK, so he doesn’t fall, but couldn’t he change his mind, and just climb back in?

Our hero is Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson), a retired explosives expert who, tired of living in a nursing home, climbs out of the window on his 100th birthday, and effectively does a runner, even though it’s more of a shuffle. He shuffles to the bus station where, unwittingly, he steals a suitcase stuffed with drugs money from a skinhead biker, so has to go on the run (or on the shuffle, I suppose) from a criminal gang, as well as the police, while making friends along the way. These friends include a small-town old fella (Iwar Wiklander), who shares his love of vodka; a perpetual student, who seems incapable of completing a degree course (David Wiberg); and buxom, plucky Gunilla (Mia Skäringer), who has stolen an elephant (Sonja) from the circus. Sonja, in not mugging it up for the camera, provides the best, most naturalistic, most credible performance by far. And I just loved the way she used her bulk.

So there is Allan’s present-day adventure but, via flashbacks, we are also filled in on his life story, and his extraordinary knack for being in the right place at the right time; his knack for meeting global leaders (Franco, Truman, Stalin, Reagan) and for involving himself in global conflicts (the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War) and for finding himself incarcerated in a Soviet gulag, but not Auschwitz.