YMMV / Roland Hassel

• Complete Monster—"The Blackmailers": Jeff Dureya, after being fired from his job as an FBI Agent because of mob connections, decided to become a criminal. Dureya sets a bomb inside of a life vest, and sending a letter to a man named Nils, ordering him to send roughly 355,000 dollars, or else he'll not only blow up a plane, but also kill his wife. Nils cannot afford that much money, so Dureya does what he said he was going to do. He manages to track down Nils and his wife Maria, shooting Maria while Nils was swimming, and blowing the plane up at the same time. Dureya's next victim is a wealthy family living in a big house. He takes advantage of the fact that their neighbors currently aren't home, and sneaks into the house while aiming through the window. Roland Hassel comes to stop Dureya, but Dureya hits Roland in the head with his gun, temporarily paralyzing him. Dureya proceeds to shoot through the window, and successfully kills two family members. His final victim is a man named Jan Calmers, who he threatens to kill his wife and destroy the plant that he works at if he won't pay him 1,1 million dollars. Despite Calmers's paying him this, Dureya had already prepared to do these things. He puts a smaller explosive inside of his wife's lighter, and lets the person he is working for blow up Calmers's plant. Once he collects his 1,1 million, the police notices that the briefcase is identical to Calmers's. Dureya proceeds to walk into his car and calls the person he is working for, basically saying that the mission is complete.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The main reason the remake is being critically panned is because it has zero resemblance to the original series. Simon Palm, a chubby, unspeakably friendly family man is now a slim, coat-wearing badass whose nationality is changed to Asian. Yngve Ruda, who is a friendly but very stoic police officer, doesn't even have a personality as he is killed within the first seconds of the series. Hell, multiple characters don't even exist in the original. Even Hassel himself is changed from a laid-back, superbly intelligent man, to a cocky, aggressive, hot-tempered, hardboiled detective, which is the opposite to the original character. The episodes themselves aren't actually bad, and some people have said that the series would have worked better if the protatonist was Roland's son or something.
• Vindicated by History: There Is No Mercy! was panned as hell when it came out, having a 5,1 on I Md B, but due to the recent Hassel films that have came out with zero resemblance to the originals, it is hard to find someone who hates the film nowadays. Thomas Hanzon, the actor who portrayed Johnny Strand, went on to become one of Sweden's biggest and most well-known actors, having appeared in every Nordic Noir crime-thriller in recent memory, either playing a sociopath or the opposite.

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