The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.
Tarik Saleh’s film gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in times of war.
The Thomas Vinterberg film’s sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.
It’s at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state’s rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.
There’s ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film’s self-conscious busy-ness.
Clorox, Ammonia and Coffee! is considerably less miserable than Free Radicals, but it’s also more schematic.