Lengthily and quirkily entitled, and based on the bestselling Swedish novel by Jonas Jonasson, this picaresque European fantasy has an element of knockabout black comedy that can't conceal its Sweet'N Low taste of sentimentality and whimsy, and a certain condescension towards old people.

Robert Gustafsson plays a feisty old guy who escapes from a care home on his 100th birthday by climbing out of the window. He gets into a scrape with criminals, and reveals to us in flashback his long and extraordinary life as an explosives expert, an unholy innocent blundering into historically important situations and meeting Truman, Stalin and Franco. Allan is an odd mix of Forrest Gump and Oskar Matzerath from Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.

Now he is a weird wrinkly old baby, with evidently none of an old person's ordinary problems, and it is difficult to tell if this unreality is intended to be of a piece with the wacky improbability of everything he has to recount, though this is surely to be taken at face value, rather than as a Walter Mitty fiction. It's a tiresome shaggy dog story, neither funny nor serious, lasting every moment of its 100 years.