The premise of The Last Viking already sounds ridiculous enough: Anker gets out of prison after fifteen years and wants to recover the money from the robbery that sent him there. The only person who knows where it was buried is his brother Manfred.

The problem is that Manfred no longer wants to be Manfred.

He is John Lennon.

So Anker’s attempt to find a bag full of stolen money somehow turns into gathering people from a psychiatric clinic and trying to put the Beatles back together. Apparently this is a perfectly reasonable way to recover buried money.

And a small warning: calling John “Manfred” is apparently not appreciated.

I found the whole thing extremely funny, but what I liked more was how the movie gradually becomes something quite different from what the ridiculous premise suggests.

The journey brings Anker and Manfred back to their childhood home, where the money was hidden years ago, but naturally the house also brings back things that are considerably harder to dig up than a bag of cash. The relationship between the brothers starts making much more sense once their childhood and especially their father enter the story. The film itself is very much built around the two brothers returning to where they grew up and, in the process, figuring out who they are.

I feel like “women with daddy issues” have been discussed approximately ten billion times in popular culture, so I actually liked seeing something focused on men with daddy issues for a change.

Because those things do not magically disappear when boys grow up.

They can become anger, insecurity, strange ways of dealing with other people, or apparently, in some cases, becoming John Lennon.

There is something both funny and quite sad about Manfred as a character. His whole John Lennon identity is initially one of the funniest things in the movie, but the more the story unfolds, the harder it becomes to see him as simply the weird brother doing weird things.

And I think that is what I liked most about The Last Viking. It begins with stolen money, criminals and the absurd task of assembling a new Beatles, but underneath all of that there is this story about two brothers carrying their childhood with them many years later.

The money might be buried somewhere around the house.

Unfortunately, so is everything else.