Main cast: Mads Mikkelsen (Duncan Vizla), Vanessa Hudgens (Camille), Katheryn Winnick (Vivian), Matt Lucas (Blut), Ruby O Fee (Sindy), Fei Ren (Hilde), Anthony Grant (Facundo), Josh Cruddas (Alexei), Robert Maillet (Karl), Julian Richings (Lomas), Johnny Knoxville (Michael Green), and Richard Dreyfuss (Porter)
Director: Jonas Åkerlund
Oh nice, I get to see Mads Mikkelsen’s butt here! Well, it could be a body double’s butt, but Mr Mikkelsen had never been shy in the past about showing everything on screen, so who knows. Still, I have no complaints whenever the bakery is open.
Mr Mikkelsen plays a pretty cool and suave silent but deadly type here, but on the whole, his character Duncan Vizla is wasted on a movie that pits him against buffoons and bunglers.
Duncan is an assassin working for the company Damocles, and as per the rules, he will retire when he turns 50 soon. He’s not so hard up about that, as assassins have an retirement fund and he’s going to cash out $8,000,000 on the day he retires. He’s going to live a quiet life, and we all know how expensive such a life can be.
As stories like this go, Damocles isn’t going to simply pay out to their retired assassins so easily. The boss, Blut, wants to sell off Damocles, and to increase their assets and hence his asking price, he’s going to have all these retired assassins murdered. That way, the company becomes the beneficiary of their retirement funds, as per a clause in the contract.
Unfortunately for Blut, Duncan has studied hard at the school of cool and deadly suaveness, and he also isn’t afraid to get naked, so… yay?
The biggest problem with Polar is that it feels played out.
All the tired old rule of cool clichés are trotted out—cheery music playing over scenes of people shooting and killing other people, sex scenes that turns into a shootout in the blink of an eye, wisecracking characters trying to come off as bad-ass and cool, lots of posturing, and the main character walking slow motion toward the camera with a stoic kind of “I’m going to kill everyone!” expression.
Everything here lacks energy and worse, the movie ends up being boring because I’ve seen everything it has to offer, done better in other movies. This one feels like a wannabe, something that is made because such movies are all the rage so why not.
I know, this one is based off a comic or something, so it’s not something hastily cobbled together to cash in on a trend, but it gives me the feeling that it is, and that’s its biggest issue: it’s boring and played out.
Even the main character feels like overdone trope walking: another assassin with a past, hoping to find some kind of redemption by helping a troubled young lady, et freaking snoozeville, people, here we come cetera.
Anyway, one extra oogie for the beefcake bakery, but yeah, this movie comes off like an inferior wannabe of a gun-fu silent assassin flick.
