The first film I saw at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival was Daniel Espinosa‘s Easy Money (Snabba Cash), starring Joel Kinnaman as JW, a starving business student who spends his free time hob-nobbing with Stockholm elite while hiding the fact he works as a taxi driver. As it turns out, in order to attain the life he wants he’s going to have to make some tough moral choices.
Since then Espinosa has gone on to direct Safe House starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds and has Child 44 coming later this year. Kinnaman moved on to “The Killing” and will lead the RoboCop remake this summer as well as a co-starring role in Espinosa’s Child 44.
However, the same weekend Kinnaman will be protecting and serving Detroit in his robo-suit, he’ll be returning as JW in Easy Money: Hard to Kill, this time directed by Babak Najafi.
After serving time for the events that went down in the first film, JW is struggling to get back on an honest path. There are glimmers of hope in his life: some venture capitalists are interested in a new piece of trading software he’s developed, and while behind bars he’s made peace with an old enemy.
This all proves to be an illusion. On leave from prison, and back in contact with his former gang, JW learns that once you’ve walked in the shoes of a criminal there just may be no going back.
As for the first film, I enjoyed it with a couple of reservations, writing in my review:
Easy Money is a fascinating crime thriller that continually raises the stakes with each twist in the plot and a handful of different characters juggled throughout. The only problem with this is that occasionally a storyline goes missing for too long resulting in a bit of a disconnect only to have it return later on down the line after you thought Espinosa had decided to abandon that angle altogether. Having not read Lapidas’s novel I can’t tell you if various aspects of the story could have been saved for future installments (the sequels are already in the works), or if enough had been snipped just to get things down to the current two hour runtime, but it’s still an entertaining watch.
Hitting theaters two days after RoboCop, Easy Money: Hard to Kill arrives in theaters and On Demand on February 14. Check out the trailer below.
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