Sukkanauhakäärme (1989) was one of the earliest Vares novels, set at a time when our hero was still fixated on the life he almost had as a big-shot lawyer. Some faint echoes of this remain in Lauri Törhönen’s 2011 film adaptation, in which Jussi Vares takes on a job tracking attorney Pauli Kontio’s unfaithful wife Annika (Rebecca Viitala), at least partly out of envy for the client seemingly having it all.

Someone who is most definitely having it all is Jesus Lobo (Ilkka Villi), a smarmy piano player who seems to have tupped half the women in Turku. Vares starts tailing him with the expectation that he has found Mrs Kontio’s lover, only to discover that Lobo has a girl in every piano bar. He also tinkles the ivories on the ferry to Stockholm, which makes him an ideal mule for drugs and “special” Swedish porn, the nature of which is never revealed, but presumably involves lukewarm saunas and insufferable smugness. As ever in Vares, Sweden is the source of all criminality and torment, a sinful utopia at the other end of the ferry lines.

Meanwhile, Torsten Rapp (Petri Manninen) busts out of jail. If that sounds like a non sequitur, it is for most of the movie, which begins with the prolonged preparations for a jailbreak. But as soon as Rapp has fought his way out of prison with a guard’s uniform dyed blue with toilet bleach, and an improvised shotgun made out of a crutch, he disappears for half the running time, only popping up again at the end for the now-traditional sequence in which one set of criminals is trumped by an even more violent thug, allowing Vares to save himself and the day by dropping between the cracks and cleaning up the mess they leave behind.

Even by the standards of the Vares films, this is a low-rent offering much more on the straight-to-video end. You can even see this in the box-art, which features a sexy, suspendered thigh flashing a snake tattoo on the DVD cover, but hides this behind a more demure basque version on the cardboard sleeve. This is pretty much all there is to say about the titular “Garter Snake” – an epithet directed at a femme fatale in a throwaway line, but otherwise nothing to do with the film at all. Our hero, meanwhile, finally gets behind the wheel of a car, tooling around town in an old Volvo before someone blows it up.

Vares, as usual, spends most of his time blundering between Turku’s watering holes – a Vares drinking game could only avoid alcohol poisoning if viewers took a sip whenever a glass wasn’t in his hand. We can only imagine the product-placement bingo that precedes each shoot, as the cast roll up in some guy’s pub and offer to make sure the sign gets into shot, as long as everyone can have free booze. In one scene, Vares and his friends each have two drinks in front of them, as if they are desperately trying to cram one more in before closing time. The fact that this was the earliest chronological Vares book to be adapted for the screen also creates a continuity confusion, as Vares “finally” sleeps with his perky part-time stripper neighbour Anna (Maria Järvenhelmi), even though she has been acting like his occasional squeeze in the four previous films.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.