Critic Reviews

The film genre that might be called Old People Behaving Hilariously gets an appealing new entry with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, a sometimes daffy, often droll Swedish movie.

This peripatetic farce practically propels itself.

Consistently daffy, consistently amusing.

There is a great deal of silliness about Allan's journey from start to finish and no real message other than to never stop taking life as it comes. But there is also a great deal of fun in watching a 100-year-old man climb out a window and disappear.

The 100-Year-Old Man surely won’t conquer the U.S. box office, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a foreign film that isn’t deadly serious. We could use more subtitled belly laughs.

This movie, as it happens, is a comedy, but it’s a frequently grisly one, and one that makes rollicking fun of a lot of dark Swedish preoccupations.

Be forewarned: The 100-Year-Old Man is edgier than its title would lead you to believe. Bad guys are bludgeoned, blown up and even crushed by an elephant, and the two duffers take a lassez-faire attitude toward disposing of them.

100-Year-Old sometimes feels like a rote biopic of a famous figure who never was, congratulating viewers on whatever recognition has rolled over from grade-school history class, then moving on to what comes next.

Despite the heavy themes, "100-Year-Old Man" keeps the tone light. It is a comedy, after all. The laugh-o-meter needle hovers fairly consistently on "amused grin."

The script never quite succeeds in making us care about Allan as a character (despite dubbing its quavering narration into English for the ease of American auds), but it finds an interesting balance for a personality who leaves a trail of disaster in his wake.