Polar
                     
Director: Jonas Akurlund
Year: 2019
Rating: 5.0
They should have titled this film, Bullets in the Head. I have no idea what Polar even means in relation to this film. But Bullets in the Head is much more to the point. Another Hitman film, another pile of dead bodies. John Wick has infested this genre - no more smart films about lone hitmen just doing their job. Now they have to be part of an organization and have to kill people with flair and a cool detachment. In the Hitman genre, there is the sub-genre of hitmen who upset the organization they are working for - either by not being willing to cross an invisible moral line to kill someone - a child or a woman usually - or they decide it is time to get out of the game. And then the organization comes looking for them. Finding them and wishing they hadn't. This is that one.



The film opens at an isolated mansion in the Chilean countryside with a man (Johnny Knoxville) frolicking with a barely clad woman around the pool. The good life he exclaims as she goes down on him. That is sadly for him the signal and a sniper shoots him and if that isn't enough two others with pistols come in and finish off the job. As he lies on his back dying, they comment on his still standing erection with admiration - and as they walk away it slowly descends like a flag at half-mast. Oh, I get it. This is basically an absurd black comedy with the violence put into overdrive for effect. For comic relief. For me, this gives the film a lot of leeway to be ridiculous - for everything to be over the top and to out Tarantino Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. These killers are like all the kids you knew in high school who skipped classes to smoke weed and never made any sense when you spoke to them. Dropouts who found a living through killing. Their numerous bloody killing scenes that follow are too preposterous to be taken seriously. It is comedy. Psychotic nitwits with guns. The victims are made to look equally as ridiculous; one of them a whale of a man that takes dozens of shots to kill. But they aren't the main player in this film.



That goes to Duncan Vizia known to his close friends and relatives of which he has none as the Black Kaiser. He has been the best assassin for the organization for years but it is time to retire. He hit fifty and the company rules stipulate that this is retirement age. When you can cash in the company pension and live comfortably for the rest of your life. He is played by Mads Mikkelsen always looking like he just crawled out of bed after a bad night and not one to use two words when one will do. He goes to live in Montana in a small town where he has nothing to do but watch TV and dream in violent montages about his many kills. He accidentally shoots his newly purchased dog when he wakes up from one of these fevered dreams. Comedy. He meets his next-door neighbor - a lonely woman (Vanessa Hudgens) who is as socially awkward as he is. Ah, cute. He tries to teach her how to shoot, she gets him to give a lecture about his experiences to an elementary class - about how to best kill with a blade. It is Montana.



Of course, it doesn't end there. Turns out that if he is dead by his fiftieth birthday - two weeks away - the money owed him reverts back to the company. And the owner Blut (Matt Lucas) who looks like Elton John in middle age is in the process of selling the company and needs that money to pay off debts to increase the value. A little anti-corporate capitalism thrown in too ala Point Blank. And for that to happen he has to kill off all of his killers approaching fifty. And so, this riff-raff crew of five is assigned to kill him. The comedy is turned off eventually and he turns into a John Wick indestructible killing machine for the final thirty-minutes. People really hated this film. Like it was a soul-sucking Incubus taking their life force away. Sure, it is excessively violent for no purpose, it runs over every hitman trope in the book, the flamboyance of the killers and the boss is style gone wild, lots of topless women with ugly men - but I just didn't take it seriously for a moment and just didn't care enough to feel much of anything.