Plot
A drug pusher grows increasingly desperate after a botched deal leaves him with a large debt to a ruthless drug lord.

Release Year: 1996

Rating: 7.4/10 (9,446 voted)

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Stars: Kim Bodnia, Zlatko Buric, Laura Drasbæk

Storyline
Frank is a drug pusher on the roll, until he makes a huge deal with dope that he hasn't payed for, and he gets busted by the police. He manages to dump the dope in a nearby lake, but he owes his supplier a lot of money (not a nice guy to owe money too). Now we follow Frank in his quest to raise money in the underworld of Copenhagen.

Writers: Jens Dahl, Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast:
Kim Bodnia - Frank
Zlatko Buric - Milo
Laura Drasbæk - Vic
Slavko Labovic - Radovan
Mads Mikkelsen - Tonny
Peter Andersson - Hasse
Vanja Bajicic - Branko
Lisbeth Rasmussen - Rita
Levino Jensen - Mike
Thomas Bo Larsen - Junkie
Lars Bom - Uro'er
Michael Hasselflug - Uro'er
Nicolas Winding Refn - Brian (as Jang Go Star)
Jesper Lohmann - Mikkel
Steen Fridberg - Lasse

Taglines: You don't have a chance. Seize it!

Release Date: 30 August 1996

Filming Locations: Copenhagen, Denmark

Box Office Details

Budget: DKK 6,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: $1,656 (USA) (9 May 1999) (1 Screen)

Gross: $4,440 (USA) (16 May 1999)

Runtime: 105 min

Trivia:
Dedicated to Peter Refn (1941-1994), Nicolas Winding Refn's uncle.

Goofs:
Continuity: When Frank enters the room and sits down next to sleeping Vic, he grabs her left leg and shakes it, but in the following shot, he drops her right leg.

Quotes:
Frank: [pulls a gun] I need your money and your drugs.
Mike: Oh, man. Now you've lost it.

"You've got no chance! Grab it!" Yes, I love it and its personal!

Rating: 10/10

Wow, I've just watched it. Probably, it'd be better to just lay back, think about the movie and, only after cooling down on emotions, review it.

But not this one.

"Pusher" tells us the story of, perhaps, the worst week of Frank's life, a 'middleweight' dealer caught in an unpayable debt to pay to Eastern European type mafia. And as his story unfolds, your blood pressure will rise just like the incredible tension increasing throughout the movie. No wonder, the debt grows higher and higher every day. Will Frank be able to ever repay it? Its just like the tag-line says:

"You've got no chance! Grab it!"

The fresh thing about this movie is that it shows what is actually happening somewhere in the middle of the 'food-chain' of drug dealing. Not at the top, covered by movies such as Casino, Scarface, Blow, or any other high budget movie made in Hollywood. After all Copenhagen is just not a world of amazing luxury and incredible piles of coke here and there. But the movie doesn't follow another cliché' either. It doesn't show us the bottom, where junkies scavenge on each other, sell their mothers for a gram of heroin, a topic which is usually covered by some low-budget off-movies.

Pusher is the ultimate, pure, refined truth about drug dealing. I have a personal experience, myself being for a time an immigrant into Denmark (I've never been a criminal or ever wanted to be, though, just to clarify that matter). And some guys, that I've came across upon coming here, went into this businesses and well, they all hit rock bottom. OK, the movie is hard to get into with its dramatic realism, but I assure you: this movie is as close to coarse truth and gritty reality as it gets!

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