A film left out of Netflix’s sizzle reel for 2022 is the Swedish thriller Black Crab starring Noomi Rapace. The trailer dropped yesterday, and I cannot fathom why they left this one out, it looks AWESOME. A post-apocalyptic action-thriller centered on an ICE SKATING MISSION? Are you kidding me? This is like the 2020s equivalent of a 1980s action movie where the pitch is something like “a hockey team fights their way off of a bear-infested glacier”, or “airplane crash survivors must defeat Bigfoot”. Yeah, yeah, it’s all dark and gritty and everyone looks miserable, but how do those shots of post-apocalyptic warriors on ICE SKATES not make you smile?
And sure, Black Crab has a literary sheen, being adapted from a novel by Swedish author Jerker Virdborg. But again, it’s about an ICE SKATING APOCALYPSE. Like, how seriously am I supposed to take this movie? The music says, Very Seriously, Indeed, but my instincts say, They’re ice skating in the apocalypse, so not that seriously. Don’t get me wrong, this looks awesome as sh-t, but I’m not sure I’m buying the tone the trailer is reaching for. I’m not sold on the self-important drama stuff but am ALL IN on the ice skating apocalypse part. Like on the sliding Road House scale of “this movie is taking itself very seriously but that only makes it funnier”, where is Black Crab going to land? A Mission: Impossible one, or a perfect Road House ten?
