This movie opens with an old man being put in a retirement home after blowing up a fox with a stick of dynamite, and it carries on in that fashion for what feels like about two and a half hours. The first bit moves along briskly. The old man escapes through a window and gets mixed up with a suitcase full of cash, a biker gang, and a cast of misfit coconspirators, all seemingly within the first 15 minutes. I liked this part of the movie. Very soon, however, we figure out that this old man is in fact a Forrest Gump/Zelig-type character, and that his unlikely life story—full of encounters with Franco and Stalin and and Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein’s idiot twin brother Herbert (ha-ha?)—is going to be told to us in an extensive series of very involved flashbacks. I found this aspect of the movie to be a bit tedious. Both the flashbacks and the main plotline start off goofy and just get goofier as they tumble along, propelled by near constant explosions—certainly more than in your typical Swedish film, anyway—because, hey look, the old man is a demolitions enthusiast. If that all sounds pretty broad, that’s because it is. Besides the Stieg Larsson movies, this is the highest-grossing Swedish film of all time! 
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: Explosions, Flashbacks, and a Retirement Home
