Copenhagen Cowboy review: the most boring version of the coolest show

It’s hard to care about a show that seems uninterested in all its best parts. That means it’s even harder to care about. copenhagen cowboyNew Netflix series from . drive Writer-director Nicholas Winding Refn has all his trademark tranquility, extreme violence, and neon-drenched sets. It also contains the most interesting worlds of his work. It’s a shame the show doesn’t show it off.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Copenhagen Cowboy season 1, but you should read it anyway, because this is really the only way you might finish this show.]

First, let’s get the important pieces the show hides out of the way. copenhagen cowboy It’s about Mew, a lucky spirit who fights people and deals drugs – although most of her time is just staring at the camera in long, almost static close-ups. It’s about the (apparently paper-thin) veil between the supernatural inhabitants of reality and the Danish criminal underworld.

In other words, this should be one of the most exciting shows ever. Instead, Refn seems bewildered by the quirkiness and fantasy of his own world, and his first two episodes of the show offer little hint of the world of the stage. Miu spends the first episode trapped in a Danish brothel that seems to be nowhere, but in the second episode she escapes down a dirt road that leads to an equally isolated Chinese restaurant. increase.

Moments like this, or when Mew seems to come to life and save a stillborn baby, copenhagen cowboy I feel like something is about to happen, anything, more interesting than that boring pilot. But the perpetually stubborn Refn shuns the fairies that his series seems poised to reach out for, and shuns them around stories that mostly focus on low-level crimes with no magical powers. Likes to keep mention of drinking blood and psychic powers in sight.

Image: Netflix

Image: Netflix

This closeness to something truly special isn’t unique to Refn’s story (which he co-wrote with Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde). Refn has always been a composer of incredible images and dedicated to his own aesthetic. copenhagen cowboyBut with every big visual swing from Refn comes the potential for big mistakes.

When Refn is at his best, he can turn sparse concrete rooms and bare walls into striking backdrops for characters. This is because the claustrophobic close-up of him continues to be trained on a motionless face, allowing the actor’s tiniest twitch to express emotion more clearly than words can. Rather than traditional shot/reverse shot dialogue, Refn spends most of its time. copenhagen cowboy The camera pans in circles, picking up a complex mix of staging and dialogue between characters. As the camera moves further away from them, it can take half of the spoken lines off screen. And of course, the neon lights completely wet every room, seemingly dripping eerily from the actors’ skin.

But Refn misses as often as it hits. copenhagen cowboy — even if some of those hits were home runs. One particularly jarring example of him is when Miu enters a trance-like state. Somewhere between our world-adjacent mental world and the grimy Danish warehouse where she meets her crime boss. During the scene, Miu dances and neon lights flash past her. She becomes light with herself and her limbs refracted. It’s a moment that seems magical. But it doesn’t work. Instead, Refn apparently lost a bet with her Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and was forced to recreate the intro for her streaming service somewhere in the series. The lights look cartoonishly faded and unnatural, nothing transcendental, and the scene’s spell breaks, quickly turning into an embarrassing misfire, baring Refn’s most ineffective pretense.

But all of this only makes the true highlight of the show all the more frustrating. A very cool show about the creatures of the world, carving their own way out of the most seedy parts of the world. Refn seems to want to say why should we ridicule the outcasts of the supernatural world when these underworlds are already ready to take in and make use of the gifts of the outcasts from the human world. Everyone has something to offer, so why is Spirit in a blue tracksuit different?

But the task of mining that good premise from the show very often finds it very difficult. In contrast to Refn’s previous series, too old to die young — struggled with similar problems, often falling into outbursts of passion that actors were allowed to hold on to for longer unhinged, expository monologues about how the world ends, etc. — copenhagen cowboy‘s dialogue is frustratingly rambunctious, caught in the momentary intrigue of its plot.

When the series finally unleashes, mainly in this season’s final episode, as spirits gather and vampires hunt them down, it’s about wasting time and not lamenting all the times this show wasn’t half as funny. becomes even more difficult.

This is not to say that Refn shouldn’t have all the static shots and striking imagery he wants, but if there is no clear point or meaning behind those images, then they This is even more true when the alternative was the gorgeous Danish monster series he created but seems tragically boring.

six episodes of copenhagen cowboy It’s currently streaming on Netflix.