Copenhagen Cowboy review: the most boring version of the coolest show

It’s hard to care about a show that doesn’t seem interested in all its best parts — and that means it’s even harder to care about Copenhagen Cowboy. Netflix’s new series Drive Nicolas Winding Refn is a writer and director. He retains all of his iconic stillness, ultra violence and neon-drenched sets. The show has his most original and interesting work. It’s just a shame the show doesn’t show it off.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Copenhagen Cowboy season 1, but you should read it anyway, because this is really the only way you might finish this show.]

Let’s get the important part, which the show keeps hidden, out of the way first: Copenhagen Cowboy is about Miu, a lucky spirit who fights people and deals drugs — even if most of her time is just spent staring at the camera in long, nearly static close-ups. It’s also about a family of vampires and the (apparently paper-thin) veil between the supernatural denizens of another reality and the Danish criminal underworld.

This should make it one of the best shows. Refn, however, seems ashamed by his fantasy and eccentricities. The first two episodes of the show barely even offer a hint at the world it’s set in, letting strangeness do the work that magic could have. Miu spends the first episode trapped in a Danish brothel that’s seemingly in the middle of nowhere, before escaping in the second down a dirt road that leads to a similarly isolated Chinese restaurant.

These moments, when Miu appears to breathe life into a dead baby, are what you need. Copenhagen Cowboy feels like it’s on the verge of being something, AnythingThe pilot was far less interesting than it is. Refn is stubborn and avoids talking about the supernatural fae he hopes to explore. Instead, he prefers to mention blood-drinking or psychic abilities at the edges of a story that centers on low-level crimes with few magical abilities.

Image by Netflix

Image by Netflix

This proximity to something truly special isn’t just limited to Refn’s story (which he co-wrote with Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde) either. Refn has always been an incredible composer of images, singularly devoted to his own specific aesthetic, and that’s no less true in Copenhagen Cowboy. Refn’s big visual movements can lead to big mistakes.

When he’s at his best, Refn can turn sparse concrete rooms and blank walls into striking backdrops for his characters as claustrophobic close-ups stay trained on their unmoving faces, letting the actors’ tiniest twitches play out their emotions more clearly than words might. Refn’s focus is on traditional shot/reverseshot dialogue. Copenhagen CowboyPan the camera around in circles, picking up complex staging and dialogue among characters. Some may even spend half of the spoken lines on screen while the camera turns away from them. And, of course, neon lights drench every room so completely that it seems to eerily drip off the actors’ skin.

Refn is just as bad as his hits. Copenhagen Cowboy — even if a few of those hits are home runs. One particularly jarring example comes as Miu enters a trance-like state, somewhere between a spirit world adjacent to ours and the grimy Danish warehouse she’s meeting a crime boss in. Miu is seen dancing as neon lights shine past and around her. They reflect light and lengthen her limbs. It’s the kind of moment that should look like magic. But it doesn’t work. Instead it looks like Refn lost a bet with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and was forced to re-create the streaming service’s intro somewhere in his series. The lights look cartoonishly faded and unnatural, and, rather than something transcendent, the scene’s spell breaks, immediately turning it into an embarrassing misfire that lays bare some of Refn’s least effective pretensions.

But all of this only makes the show’s true highlights more frustrating. In the six hour show, there is an incredibly cool documentary about Netherworld-like creatures who haunt Denmark’s streets and forests, creating paths from the worst parts of the planet. Refn wants to suggest that the underworlds already have the ability to accept and utilize the skills of those who are not in the same league as them, which is why they shouldn’t be mocking the people from the supernatural realm. Everyone’s got something to offer, so why should a spirit in a blue tracksuit be any different?

It can feel overwhelming to try and find the right premise in the show. In sharp contrast to Refn’s previous series, Too old to live long — which suffered from similar problems but often threw itself into bursts of passion where actors were allowed to go long on unhinged, explicative monologues about things like how the world might end — Copenhagen Cowboy’s dialogue is frustratingly turgid and stuck in the moment-to-moment machinations of its plot.

When the series finally does let loose, mostly in this season’s final episode as spirits converge and the vampire hunting them emerges, it becomes even more difficult not to mourn all that wasted time and all the hours this show spent not being even half this interesting.

None of this is to say that Refn shouldn’t have all the static shots and striking images he wants, but when there’s not any clear point or meaning behind those images, they start to grate over the course of a six-hour season. It was even worse when Refn had the option of the stunning Danish monster series, which he is tragically bored from.

Six episodes Copenhagen CowboyNetflix is now offering streaming.