“How can I retire? I’m booked.” George Burns age 100

Imagine Swedish director Ingmar Bergman waking up one morning and discovering that he’s Woody Allen writing “Zelig.”

Imagine Forrest Gump with a Swedish accent.

Imagine movie theater owners around the world trying to find the letters and space to mount their marquees.

Put them together, and you have Felix Herngren’s wonderful, zany, impossibly funny “Old Man.” That’s what I’m calling it now, because I don’t have the room.

“Old Man” sprang out of a best-selling Swedish novel, and took shape in a bright, sparkling, brilliantly cast comic film, maybe one of the funniest of the year. Yes, it’s a mixture of English and subtitled Swedish, but it’s the kind of high-grade Preston Sturges slapstick that even Bushmen find funny.

Swedish comedy actor Robert Gustafsson creates Allan Karlsson, a Swedish centenarian condemned to a nursing home at age 100 because, in an attempt to kill a chicken-eating fox with dynamite, he blew up his hen house and set his own house on fire. Talk about last straws.

Robert fell in love with things that go bang at an early age, and his love of explosives carries him through life, drawing him into one mad adventure after another.

It all starts here when the nursing home springs a surprise 100th birthday party that Robert wants no part of, so he opens a window and jumps out, wanders to a bus station, and with only a few pennies in his pocket, buys a ticket to “anywhere.”

As he is in the station, a tattooed, manic biker is having trouble getting a big suitcase into the tiny toilet. He let’s the old man hold it. Robert shrugs when he sees the bus arrive, he boards, with the biker’s metal suitcase.

Okay, we’re off. That suitcase holds a big time British gangster’s 50 million dollar cache of drug money, and it’s going to go a long way to the end of the movie. But this isn’t your cute little Scandinavian caper flick, this unfolds like a tourist map of the world’s greatest history hits.

In a series of brilliant flashbacks, Robert, in Zelig fashion, will dance in Spain with Franco, in Moscow with Stalin, help Oppenheimer solve his detonation problem, work with an “Einstein,” Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, and an assortment of great comic bad guys.

Of course the nursing home is desperate to find their 100-year-old tenant, and so they set a retiring cop out to find him. A trio of bumbling drug running biker gunmen are looking for Robert and his suitcase as well.

From Moscow to a gulag prison, to the Manhattan Project in the desert to Reagan’s garden wall, Robert collects a wonderful cast of friends who fall in love with him: the beautiful, tough gun wielding Gunilla (Mia Skaringer), and her trained elephant, Julius, a wise and thieving travel mate, and an assortment of KGB and CIA agents. From Sweden to the brilliant last scene on a highway in Bali, it’s a trip to remember and one wonderfully photographed by Goran Hallberg and edited by Henrik Kallberg.

“Old Man” is the summer fortune cookie you’ve been waiting for. Crack it open, and it reads ” It’s never too late.”

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.