Pusher 3 (18) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Film classification is so lax nowadays that when a movie gets an "18" certificate slapped on it you can be pretty sure it will contain strong meat. For the first hour of the Danish lowlife drama Pusher 3, however, the prospect of violence (it rejoices in the tag-line "I'm The Angel of Death") is unfulfilled, and instead of gasping in horror I heard myself chuckling, not entirely from nervousness.

I hadn't seen writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn's previous Pusher films - this third is apparently not a sequel but a variation on the 1996 original - but I had seen and admired his first foray into English-language cinema, the Lynchian, fugue-like thriller Fear X (2003). Pusher 3 examines a day in the life of Serbian drug baron Milo (Zlatko Buric), whose standing in the Copenhagen underworld is under threat from abrasive new gangs on the block. Fiftyish, heavy-set and lugubrious, Milo is also battling his own drug problem, distractedly attending an addicts' support group where he announces that he has been clean for five days. He could use a little boost today, though, because not only has he to offload a huge quantity of heroin but also, just as importantly, he has to cook dinner for 50 at his daughter's 25th birthday party. And, by degrees, the day starts going downhill: he manages to give his henchmen food poisoning, the heroin turns out to be dodgy, and the bantam gangster who's supposed to sell it disappears.

Milo doesn't exhibit grace under pressure, exactly, but he's not the twitching wreck that Ray Liotta became when he had to juggle a similar dinner-and-drug deal at the end of Goodfellas. Indeed, for a career criminal, he's a likeable fellow, much more so than his hard-faced daughter (Marinela Dekic) or any of the thugs with whom he associates. It's just his misfortune to be desperate for a fix at a time when he most needs his wits about him and, once the business turns from drugs into people-trafficking, you sense that director Refn is about to rub our noses in something quite gruesome. So it proves, yet even in the shocking Grand Guignol of its climax one fights the urge to belly-laugh as much as to barf, a giddiness abetted by Buric's tremendous, bear-like, presence - think Tony Soprano with a longer fuse - and Refn's sly, almost English sense of the ridiculous. Nothing tickled me more than the scene in which Milo, his banquet ruined, dashes to the local Chinese and asks for 50 portions of fried fish. Comes the straight-faced reply: "To eat here or take away?"