Polar review – hyper-violent Netflix thriller drowns in gore and greatness…

Mads Mikkelsen stars as a hitman facing retirement in a highly-intelligent and engrossing action film stuffed with explicit violence.

Over the last few months, Netflix has released a number of highly acclaimed and duly celebrated films, including the recent Oscar nominees “Roma” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and such equally fascinating and worthy titles as “Private Life,” and “The Other Side of the Wind.”

Yes, one can certainly debate about the downside of the limited opportunities to see them in their proper setting—actual theaters—but in terms of sheer quality, a run of titles on that level is enough to build up an enormous amount of goodwill among movie buffs and this new film may not be for everyone (seriously, which are?) but Polar has buckets of style, bloodthirsty amounts of gore and hyper-active deadly panache that resembles a Quentin Tarantino film more than anything.

Mads Mikkelsen in Polar PHOTO: Netflix

The story of a hitman, Duncan Vizla, facing an existential crisis and looking to retire has worked well for cinema, whether it’s played for pathos (The American), comedy (The Matador) or something in between (In Bruges). Polar is the latest entry to this sparsely populated subgenre and belongs definitively at the top of the list

Helmed by music video director Jonas Åkerlund, Polar stars Mads Mikkelsen as Duncan – or the “Black Kaiser” – one of the world’s greatest hitmen, and for years, Duncan has been a top employee at Damocles, a shadowy cabal of killers run by a doughy-faced psycho.

As we meet Duncan, he’s receiving his annual physical (you know the drill men of a certain-age, finger up the backside from a short but funny Doctor offering freshly made cakes). He’s turning 50 in two weeks, and looking forward to retirement.

Why?

The tradeoff is that they are given an extremely generous pension package that pays off nearly in full to them upon retirement. Unfortunately for the company, too many people are coming up to their retirement ages and instead of paying them all off and jeopardizing an important business deal, the head of the organization, Mr. Blut played by the wonderful, (Matt Lucas), is hellbent on ensuring Duncan doesn’t make it to retirement age, and elects to instead send his own personal quartet of killers out to kill those employees so that their funds revert to the company. (It sounds ludicrous in writing, but in the film, it actually feels like an amusing dig at corporate America forcing early retirement and shortchanging employees’ 401k accounts.)

Surely nothing could go wrong setting Mads Mikkelsen in your gunsights? Yeah, right. The steely predator’s stare and wolfish charisma that made him such a perfect cannibal psychiatrist on the TV series Hannibal is very well utilized here.

To this end, Blut’s right-hand woman, Vivian, coolly played by Vikings star (Katheryn Winnick), sends Vizla off to Belarus for a final job that is actually a frame-up. Being the greatest, he sees through the plot immediately, kills all of his attackers and demands that Vizla and Vivian pay up his contracted $2 million fee before slipping away to his remote cabin in a small Montana town.

Unfortunately, Winnick’s character loses her sting early on.

Matt Lucas’ Herman Blut – the film’s chief antagonist – is a fantastic but cring-worthy and sadistic baddie. Lucas expertly walks the line between irritating and charismatic. He feels very much like a “comic book character,” almost too over-the-top in some instances, but his ruthless nature and overall sinister demeanor balance his more flamboyant moments.

Of course, where would a film about a retiring assassin be without the presence of a woman who helps him develop a newfound respect for life, to misquote a film far better than this one?

This would be Camille (Vanessa Hudgens), the shy woman who lives in the cabin next door. Duncan’s anxious neighbor seems to be inhabiting her own earnest indie drama about death, mourning, and rebirth.

Although initially aloof, Vizla’s cold exterior begins to melt a bit and he is soon chopping wood for her on the sly and agreeing to talk to the young kids at school about his experiences traveling around the world.

While all of this is going on, Blut’s hit squad is traveling to all the places where Vizla owns properties and slaughtering anyone who happens to be there —unfortunately, Montana is last on the list so we have to see them kill a lot of people along the way.

The film is adapted from a webcomic and Dark Horse graphic novel of the same name and its roots are manifest primarily through flashy character intro title screens, outlandish costume design and the hyper-violence, which may have played less offensively on the page than it does on the screen.

Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously over-the-top and portrayed wonderfully with constructed violence sequences, but seems to be the only thing seriously at the top of the director’s agenda, plus the allowance for gratuitous nudity follows a close second.

Prime example is the character of Sindy (Ruby O Fee), who seduces men into prolonged sex acts so her team can simultaneously snipe their target from afar and flank them on the ground (its an interesting take, and works by only shocking the viewer by shouting at the screen: ‘What did I just witness!’).

Thankfully, all of the fight choreography and gunplay is fantastic. Duncan in action is a violent and brutal display of lethal efficiency. Director Jonas Åkerlund strikes a nice balance of gun-fu and hand-to-hand combat.

POP-UP STAR OF THE 80S:

Elsewhere, Richard Dreyfuss cameos as a portly former killer reduced to drinking his life away in a karaoke bar; but isn’t really in it enough to make a difference one way or another but whose presence is indeed baffling but at the same time charming and ingenious. With a long career, (I assumed) Dreyfuss felt that it was time for a new film to add to his already long list of credits as badasses.

Also, look out for the one and only Johny Knoxville!

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Mads Mikkelsen and Vanessa Hudgens’ on-screen chemistry brings heart to the film, and there’s a sweet subplot that builds up during the film and finally comes to frutition in the closing stages and possibly sets up for a second film, (and franchise!)

How Polar plays out from a narrative perspective will not come as a surprise for too many viewers. But with tons of galore, great fight scenes, the gruesome torture, and death scenes and the shockingly amount of flesh on display, this is not a family-friendly film!

5/5 STARS