I knew that the Jönssonligan movies were supposed to get worse and worse following the first movie, but as I kept on watching them, I thought the series held a surprisingly consistently decent quality and entertainment value throughout. Even the movie before this one, featuring Peter Haber as Gösta Ekman's replacement, was reasonably easy to watch. I finally understood the critique of the later Jönssonligan movies when I watched this one.
I guess you could argue that every movie after the third one was a "money grab", but I'd still say the script in those movies were intelligent enough to not come across as such. This was the first movie in which I truly thought the "money grab-script" became visible. There's a clear complete lack of creativity, cleverness and imagination present in this film compared to previous installments.
Harry and Vanheden never really stop being entertaining, since Brunnberg and Gustafson perfected their characters years before this was done, but their characterization in this film consists of repeating the exact same thing for almost two hours. Harry's alcoholism is the funniest thing in the entire movie which I think is really unfortunate. The scene at the hotel with drunk Harry and the drunk policeman is the funniest scene and that's not a good sign.
Skarsgård's character is so humorless that I started feeling nauseous. I know the point was that he contrasts everything else in the movie by being humorless, but it just doesn't fit. Skarsgård tries hard to make the character contribute something comedic to the film but the problem is that the character simply isn't funny
The largest problem is the silly and stupid comedy though. I had heard that people sometimes feel that their "intelligence is insulted" when consuming "bad" fiction, and I never had any idea what that meant. Until I watched this. This movie roasts any potential intelligence you may have. The previous movies always required some form of ability for abstract thinking to watch, no matter how low, but this movie decides to go for the weakest slapstick "haha! He just fell into a trash bag!" humor possible.
A dishonorable mention goes to the finale of the film. It has to be one of the finest examples of bad writing I had hoped to never see. It's dumb, predictable, inconsistent in characterization, and in many ways incomprehensibly sexist, especially since it was made in 1995
I feel completely justified in this rant. Watch the first six films if you want, they're all decent to brilliant, but if you want to keep your faith in human intelligence, do not watch this. It's very understandable that the franchise has repeatedly flopped since this came out, and it's proof that the Swedish film industry should leave the franchise alone to rest in peace. With that said, I honestly don't think the 2015 and 2020 films were worse than this one; I don't think that's possible.
