Susanne Bier has come up with another of her toweringly high-concept and faintly risible drama-thrillers: this is the Danish-language movie she made before Serena, her underrated period piece with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. A Second Chance has a premise and final twist that somehow manage to be ingenious and yet slightly crass at the same time. But it’s all acted with absolute conviction, like a feature-length episode of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. Perhaps only Bier and her severe-looking repertory cast could get away with it. Andreas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is the clean-cut young cop with excellent career prospects and a perfect life; he has a lovely home, a beautiful wife Anna (Maria Bonnevie), and he’s devoted to his new baby. He and his boozy, depressive partner Simon (Ulrich Thomsen) are disgusted when they are called to a violent domestic dispute in a squalid flat and the culprit is a notorious drug addict, they know all too well: Tristan (Nikolaj Lie Haas), who is probably abusing his baby. Tristan’s life is a queasy inverse of Andreas’s, and their fates are to collide. There are some unwatchably, all-but-unforgivably grim scenes, but Bier carries them off, just about. It’s ripe for a Hollywood remake, probably starring Ryan Reynolds as the straight-arrow cop, Josh Hutcherson as his mate and John Hawkes as the druggie.
