Not since the days of Ingmar Bergman (or, alright, Abba) has it been so cool to be Scandinavian. With the popularity of the Millennium novels/films at fever pitch, not to mention well-received genre flicks Rare Exports and Troll Hunter, Scandinavia is definitely making it big in the cinematic arena right now. Its latest offering is Headhunters, a stylish Norwegian mystery (based on the book by Jo Nesbø) that doesn’t exactly break any rules, but is bags of fun anyway.
Featuring everything from grisly car wrecks to speared mutts, Headhunters is as frequently grim as that multi-meaning title suggests. Not that you’d guess as much from the film’s spritely opening scenes. We’re introduced to anti-hero Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a status-hungry, anxiety-riddled suit who exploits his role as a corporate headhunter to gain important information that’ll help him in his on-the-side hobby of art-thievery. Except then he rips off the wrong guy in Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Game Of Thrones), an ex-military bloodhound who turns Roger from hunter to huntee.
After a fleet-footed and funny opening, Headhunters quickly transforms into a breakneck chase movie. The film’s location-dashing mid-section is often wordless and viscerally involving, mostly thanks to Hennie’s committed turn. It also includes a comically horrible scene where Roger, shall we say, ‘pulls a Slumdog’.
The main problem here, though, is that Headhunters’ mystery is too unwieldy to truly rivet. It’s so bogged down in boring corporate politics that it’s unable to function as the glorified action movie it has every right to be. As a study of a man brought down by his own insecurities, though, it’s often tongue-in-cheek funny, even if tonally director Morten Tyldum seems torn between two different movies. Still, despite its flaws, Headhunters is pacy and engaging. The Scando invasion continues… 3/5
New York. The Roosevelt Hotel’s twenty-first floor. Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) has some breakfast. Wipes the room of prints. Writes a suicide note. Opens the window. And steps out onto a ledge… When it comes to grabbing an audience’s attention, nothing does it quite like a bloke threatening to throw himself off the top of a Manhattan high-rise. It was true in Henry Hathaway’s 1951 drama Fourteen Hours, and it’s true for Man on a Ledge.
Crafting a movie around a real-life tragedy is an understandably tricky endeavour. While James Cameron’s Titanic doomed hundreds to their deaths, pretty much everybody alive at the time of that travesty had long since passed on. Not so with the Snowtown murders, which were committed in an isolated, downtrodden region of Australia not 12 years ago, and are still a justifiably touchy issue for those who live there – not least the families of serial killer John Bunting’s 11 victims.
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but thanks to a sizzling Zoe Saldana, Luc Besson’s latest shoot-’em-up is a sure-fire scorcher. Teaming with the feisty femme of the moment, Besson has a writer/producer credit on Colombiana, but it’s quite clearly his bambino. Once envisioned as a sequel to Léon starring a grown-up Mathilda, but reworked into a Nikita-aping, assassin-on-a-mission vengeance flick, Colombiana combines both the best and worst of Besson.
Why would the director of an impeccably polished period tragedy like Atonement choose to make an action movie? Well, why not? And if Hanna’s anything to go by, it’d be no crime against cinema for Joe Wright to spend the rest of his career crafting action movies. In fact, many might demand it of him.
for a bewitchingly unconventional lead. Perfectly captured by Ronan (who worked with Wright on Atonement), she presents Hanna as a fascinating enigma; quirky and serious and one heck of a grappler. The joy and humanity in Wright’s film comes from seeing Hanna unceremoniously exposed to the outside world, adrift from everything she’s ever known, then watching as her cheeks gradually fill with the colour of life.
Talking of images, Hanna’s packed with bold visual design. Blanchett, on fantastic form as the drawling Texan CIA agent, appears in Hanna’s most brilliantly orchestrated shot, emerging from the shadows inside the gaping, razor-fanged maw of a giant funhouse wolf. Meanwhile, Bana gets his own iconic moment in the form of an underground skirmish, while he convinces as an attentive father at the film’s opening.
Here’s Brad Pitt. With a gun. Looking mean as hell. It’s the first shot of him from the currently filming thriller Coogan’s Trade, a book adaptation helmed by Andrew Dominik (the director of moody Western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford).
