I’m not really quite sure where to start with this. Put simply, Curling King was a major disappointment. Falling somewhere between “Wes Anderson does The Big Lebowski” minus all of the charm of those two ingredients, Curling King falls completely flat, the pseudo-quirky tone of the film completely unbearable at times. 

Essentially a long form Norwegian sitcom, Curling King tells the story of a champion curler whose obsession with the sport led to him being sanctioned on mental health grounds. When an old friend falls ill, our hero and his band of curlers must come together once again to help him. 

The vast majority of the cast are from Norwegian television. The character of Marcus, played by Jon Øigarden is genuinely funny at times, with his occasional burst of profanities in an American accent and muse on speedo’s the highlights of the film, but elsewhere its simply annoys, the sheer brazenness of the way in which it mimics its influences quite staggering (at one point a musical cue from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is recycled in its entirety, and the villain of the piece couldn’t be closer to Ben Stiller’s White Goodman if the film was an official remake of Dodgeball).