It’s Not Easy to Lap Up ‘In China They Eat Dogs’

“In China They Eat Dogs” keeps you off balance and intrigued during its first 20minutes. So it’s all the more disappointing that soon after it collapses into a poor-man’s “Pulp Fiction,” a mindless blood bath in which you swiftly lose track of the body count. It’s depressing to note that in its native Denmark it reportedly outperformed “Star Wars: Episode I” last year at the box office.

Dejan Cukic stars as the bland and naive bank clerk Arvid, whose hard-edged girlfriend, Henne (Trine Dyrholm), tells him he is the most boring man in the world--that even a pollen count would be more interesting. This is how he begins the day that will turn his life upside-down. At work, when a ferocious robber (Peter Gantzler) holds up the bank, Arvid unhesitatingly bashes him over the head with a co-worker’s squash racquet.

Rewarded by his boss with a two-week vacation, Arvid has his moment as a hero, but it proves fleeting. He comes home to find that Henne has cleared out their apartment and has spray-painted a message on the living room wall that can’t be quoted in a family paper. He is then subjected to the wrath of the pretty Astrid (Line Kruse), who announces that she is the bank robber’s wife and that her husband is a good guy driven to desperation to get a lot of money so they can have a baby via costly artificial insemination. In the meantime, Henne’s story is being narrated by an American (Lester Wiese), who has been dispatched from California for a meeting of some kind with Arvid.

Because Astrid is so attractive and seemingly in such distress, you have the feeling that a spark will ignite between her and the instantly guilt-stricken Arvid. That’s a direction that might have proved fun, but writer Anders Thomas Jensen (a two-time Academy Award nominee and a 1999 Oscar winner for the short “Election Night”) and director Lasse Spang Olsen have another, less rewarding idea in mind: that Arvid is now so disillusioned that he seeks out his estranged brother, Harald (Kim Bodnia), a restaurateur and gangster, to help him hold up an armored truck. Not only will Arvid give a hunk of the loot to poor Astrid but he also hopes that Harald and his gang will spring bank robber Franz from prison.

The burly Harald is an ultra-cool, ultra-ruthless tough guy who introduces Arvid to a life of violent crime as the film shifts into a by-now-familiar cockamamie gangster comedy strewn with savage mishaps. Harald, the sociopath supreme, mesmerizes Arvid with his insistence that “nothing is right or wrong, you decide for yourself. It is not wrong to eat a dog in China.”

This icy killer, however, bonds so closely with his brother that it’s as if he has fallen in love with him, an ironic development in a film with so strong a strain of homophobia. As the bodies pile up higher and higher, you can’t help but wish that something as rotten as this movie didn’t just stay in Denmark.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: extreme violence involving countless fatal shootings and numerous acts of brutality, some language, some nudity.

‘In China They Eat Dogs’

Dejan Cukic: Arvid

Kim Bodnia: Harald

Trine Dyrholm: Henne

Lester Wiese: Richard

A Scanbox International presentation. Director Lasse Spang Olsen. Producer Steen Herdel. Screenplay Anders Thomas Jensen. Cinematographer Martin Soborg. In Danish and English. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.