A good comic thriller knows how to frustrate the viewer in all the best ways — creating suspense through a collection of close shaves, near misses and moments when the heroine or hero “almost” gets away.

A bad comic thriller frustrates in ways that call attention to contrivances, melodramatic touches and lapses in logic.

Jon Holmberg’s Swedish caper-comedy/prison escape dramedy and “Fugitive” spoof “Trouble” is more amusingly frustrating than stupidly frustrating.

Good frustration, our hapless hero Conny (Filip Berg of “A Man Called Ove”) is a big box electronics store salesman and single dad who winds up in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He was installing a customer’s TV, jamming to Blue Swede’s one hit on headphones, when the homeowner was stabbed right behind him. Yeah, he’s dumb enough to pick up the bloody screwdriver after the killing.

Bad frustration? Conny is arrested, given an inept lawyer (Måns Nathanaelson) and railroaded into prison facing 18 years, all before the widow (Sissela Benn) has a chance to bury her husband. Conny escapes from prison just as they come home from the funeral?

Man, Swedish justice is blind and swift.

Holmberg’s jaunty tale throws obstacle after obstacle in Conny’s way, unhappy accidents (stabbed in the hand as a bystander in a prison fight) and head-slapping coincidences.

All this happens because he’s trying to pick up extra shifts at work so that his little girl — who lives with her remarried mother — can have a horse.

Time and again this script, which takes in coke deals, SWAT raids, life in a Swedish prison, a misplaced phone with video evidence on it and a system hellbent on ensuring his case is “closed,” gives us glimpses of a way out only to have dopey Conny miss the obvious because the screenwriters are determined to get their 100 minutes in.

Conny was trapped in a low-paying dead-end job, driving a VERY old Honda Civic, and running flight training simulations on his home gaming system. Because he wants to raise his income and better his life? Or because his ex (Shirin Golchin) married a pilot?

When he gets caught-up in a murder case, the one cop to believe him, Diana (Amy Deasismont) is green and dismissed by her no-nonsense boss (Eva Melander) because Diana bases her “hunch” on her contact, that same evening, with Conny as a headphones-buying customer at his store.

Rushed into prison, his only advice from the other convicts is “go for the throat.” That doesn’t keep him from getting caught in a brawl.

Fortunately, the gang boss inside (Dejan Cukic) has plotted a prison break, and Conny stumbles across the tunnel. Unfortunately, gang enforcer Musse (Joakim Sällquist) saw him stumble across that tunnel. No, climbing into a washing machine in the prison laundry isn’t the best way to hide.

“Did you think this through (in Swedish, or dubbed into English)?”

“No.”

But a photo in Conny’s cell has them thinking he’s a pilot. Next thing he knows, he’s in on the escape as their getaway pilot/driver, trying to get to “new evidence” (that missing phone) even as he’s at the service of ruthless convicted bank robbers.

There are plot twists that even Conny recognizes. But when you’re on morphine because you’ve just been shot, you can’t quite summon up the memory amd reference the right “Harrison Ford film.”

“Indiana Jones?”

The obstacles that pile up — Evidence destroyed? Or is it? — do battle with the frustrations at Conny’s ineptitude as the picture works itself and the viewer into an amusing tizzy.

This one had me yelling at the screen more than once.

“Dude, most of the bad guys are chatting on a hotel penthouse balcony. Lock the DOOR behind them and call the cops!”

But director Holmberg, his co-writer and his leading man (Berg has an Aaron Eckhart look and John Krasinski vibe) do a splendid job of making us root for this guy and slap our heads at his head-slapping haplessness.

We do all this as we try to figure out not where this is going — that’s pre-ordained — but what logical and illogical twists they contrive to toss at us before the hero, the movie and the viewer arrive at our final, funny destination.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Filip Berg, Amy Deasismont, Måns Nathanaelson,
Joakim Sällquist and Eva Melander

Credits: Directed by Jon Holmberg, scripted by Jon Holmberg and Tapio Leopold. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38