On one level, I enormously enjoyed this. It’s an incredible story and Skarsgard is wonderfully charismatic and often side-splittingly funny whenever he is on the screen – which he is for 90% of the time. It reminded me, strongly, of The Wolf of Wall Street. In both cases, the story is told of a charismatic rogue, very much on his terms, through his eyes and showing him in a highly entertaining light. But, and this is a big ‘but’ it is easy to forget that, essentially, both figures are really pretty unpleasant people. Completely self-absorbed, they have absolutely no care for the devastation they wreak in their track, both physically and, perhaps even more disturbing, emotionally. Clark is pretty much an emotional vampire, sucking off and using every person he comes across and always with the central concern that he will be all right. The film does, rightly, show, that he had a pretty appalling childhood and youth, very damaging in almost every way possible and his subsequent life is a way for him to deal with it – insofar as he does actually truly recognize what he went through. In many respects, he does not. This is apparent at the end when working with a writer on his autobiography and she wants to talk as much to people who knew him rather than simply Clark and then begins to realize what sort of a person he truly is.
However, this occurs only at the end of the 6-episode series. For the vast majority of these episodes, we see the events and consequences of Clark’s actions solely through Clark’s eyes. In that sense this is a very sentimental film.
The visual style is, very appropriately, often very flashy and attention grabbing – multi-split screens, vivid colour-saturated sequences, a cartoon sequence (ironically, if typically, dealing with a particularly violent sequence) and other such devices.
It is fun to watch – but with the provisos that I have indicated.