The Danish heist thriller “The Quiet Ones” centers on a big score that involves using garbage trucks to block the major roads in Copenhagen to buy the thieves enough time to raid a cash-handling firm. The many moving parts get the better of the filmmakers.
The director, Frederik Louis Hviid, opens the movie with a display of self-defeating virtuosity: a robbery filmed in a single take entirely from the inside of an armored van. (That vantage point stops making sense once the drivers exit the vehicle, but Hviid doesn’t seem like the kind of filmmaker to cut away from a showboating shot for the sake of narrative logic.)
One year later, Slimani (Reda Kateb), the man responsible for the van robbery, recruits Kasper (Gustav Giese) to game out the break-in at the cash-handling firm. Kasper is a family man and a boxer, and his competitive streak inspires him to maximize the take. Slimani is a hardened criminal made less menacing by Kateb’s faltering rhythms in English, the gang’s lingua franca. The bulk of “The Quiet Ones” is set in 2008, occasioning a lot of dubiously relevant references to the financial crisis.
The heist takes up more than 20 minutes of screen time, but Hviid — who has to juggle the robbers at the firm, the garbage truck drivers, the police and a security guard (Amanda Collin) — makes a hash of the competing perspectives. The road-blocking gambit is barely shown, and Collin’s character, fleshed out specifically for this moment, is forgotten for much of the sequence.
The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.
The Quiet Ones
Not rated. In Danish, English and Swedish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
