Starring Noomi Rapace

Directed by Adam Berg

Netflix, out now

To end an apocalyptic war and save her daughter, a reluctant soldier embarks on a desperate mission to cross a frozen sea carrying a top-secret cargo.

‘Come on guys!! Listen up, what apocalyptic sub-genre haven’t we done yet?

‘Weeelll… the sun’s gone loco a few times, and enough with the incoming asteroids already. Vampires, zombies, pandemics, yadda yadda yadda. AI’s that take over the world, that’s always a good one. Too hot and dry (The Day The Earth Caught Fire), or too wet (Kevin Costner with gills in Waterworld anyone?). Nuclear Armageddon is usefully destructive. Or people who can’t get to sleep!! That’d finish everyone off.’

‘Be serious! No one would ever make an apocalypse movie like that!’

‘OK, how about people struggling to survive an unnamed apocalypse like in The Road? That was a great movie.’

‘It was, but my God it was soooo depressing.’

‘Duh! It’s the apocalypse.’

‘So, let’s brighten it up a bit. Let’s have an un-named apocalypse, like some nameless war that’s been going on for years and years and everyone’s forgotten why they’re fighting it, and there’s a group of hardened conscripts – the only people who can stop the madness – getting a deadly secret weapon to a secret thing…’

‘Still sounds depressing.’

‘…but the USP of our movie is that they’re all skaters!’

‘Sorry? What?’

‘Skaters! You know, like Torvill and Dean, only more macho? One of them is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo!’

‘The Apocalypse on Ice!!  You’re a genius. I love you!’

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Netflix’s latest apocalyptic release, the randomly titled ‘Black Crab’. Spoiler alert: There are no crabs of any hue in this movie.

To be fair, there are some good elements to this film. The Northern European warscapes in the opening act are convincingly executed and horribly prescient of the now far too familiar news footage we see nightly from Ukraine. Rapace is a compelling presence – even if her hair is a little too beautifully coiffured at times. The set-up about the lost daughter helps us to engage with our ruthless heroine.

But then they start skating. I appreciate that they have to cross a frozen sea – and I guess if you’re Scandinavian, skating doesn’t carry the same associations as it does for a British viewer, but it just made me giggle. I felt bad, because the cast were giving it their all. However, after ten minutes of swooshing, I managed to park my prejudices and started to enjoy the movie, which could be subtitled, The Dirty Half Dozen On Ice Save The World. There are some decent set pieces, and some imaginative apocalyptic design touches which I haven’t seen before, but then, just as I had settled in happily for the duration, the film makes a screeching handbrake turn for its final act and goes incomprehensibly barking mad. Suddenly we’re in a sort of Bond Villain secret base, complete with a Rosa Klebb character who appears out of left field and does a lot of (appropriately) icy glaring.

I’d happily suspended my disbelief for well over sixty minutes but nothing in the last half hour made any sense whatsoever, and it didn’t look as if Ms Rapace necessarily knew what was going on either. It’s a shame, because it was shaping up to be half decent.

Verdict: If you do give Black Crab a pirouette, prepare to be unimpressed. 5/10

Martin Jameson