A macabre concoction that plays like a colloboration between the Coen brothers and the Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Marc Caro team working at half-speed, the underwhelming cannibal comedy The Green Butchers stars Nikolaj Lie Kaas in the dual role of a stoner butcher who gets off on slaughtering God's creatures, and his twin brother, a brain-damaged animal lover who spends much of the film hooked up to a respirator. Mads Mikkelsen co-stars as Kaas' partner, a sad-sack, meat-obsessed loser perpetually coated in a veil of flop sweat. Mikkelsen stumbles upon the key to success when he begins serving human flesh at his butcher shop—unsurprisingly, it tastes like delicious chicken—and the boys' mystery meat soon makes them the toast of a small town conveniently full of morbidly obese loners whose absence nobody seems to notice.
The Green Butchers makes at least a few half-hearted attempts to generate sympathy for its bedraggled misfit protagonists, giving Kaas an obligatory love interest and a tortured family history. But it shows only slightly more respect for the dignity of human life than its murderous entrepreneurs. Since the film seems to view most of its aggressively quirky supporting characters as skin-bags full of bone, gristle, and sinew, why not have them transformed into savory meat products?
A ready-made cult film populated by the kind of freakish grotesques whose cartoonish features make caricaturing redundant, The Green Butchers moves at a funereal pace that couldn't be less conducive to comedy. Then again, the film betrays a strange indifference to the concept of generating laughs; it skimps on gags, and luxuriates in a low-key morbid atmosphere. It's a clammy, odd duck of a movie, a black comedy that seems strangely content with merely being morbid.