The 100-Year-Old Man (2013)

THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D Felix Herngren
    Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg,
    Mia Skäringer, Jens Hultén, Bianca Cruzeiro, 
    Alan Ford, David Shackleton, Sven Lönn, 
    Georg Nikoloff, Simon Säppenen, Manuel Dubra
This movie starts out with an old man named Allan Karlsson exacting some payback on the fox who has just killed his pet tabby. The payback involves a few sticks of dynamite, which is more than enough to take out the fox, but it also lands Allan in an old folks' home, from which he escapes on his 100th birthday by doing what the title indicates, except that he doesn't exactly disappear. He catches a ride to the train station, buys a ticket to somewhere, and comes into the possession of a suitcase full of cash. He makes a few friends, and a bunch of skinhead gangsters want their suitcase back, and a police detective is after all of them, and there's an elephant. That's not all. In flashbacks you learn that Allan lost his parents at an early age, found he had a peculiar talent for blowing things up, and fought against the Fascists in Spain, where ironically he wound up saving the life of Francisco Franco. He helped Robert Oppenheimer solve a critical problem at Los Alamos, got drunk with Harry Truman the day President Roosevelt died, turned down a chance to dance with Josef Stalin, escaped from a Siberian gulag, and spent years passing worthless messages back and forth as a Cold War double agent. Like Leonard Zelig and Forrest Gump, Allan's an accidental everyman, turning up in the most unlikely places at absurdly historic moments, the difference being that Allan gets to work with high explosives. It takes some crazy luck to live to be 100, and Allan's personal supply appears to be infinite. If he were to climb out a window and disappear again at 105, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.