Polar

Polar's opening scene takes place outside a big country mansion in Chile. A man loaded up on viagra is murdered by 3 assassins while being pleasured by the (unbeknownst to him) 4th. As the helicopter containing his killers flies off in the background his drug induced erection deflates in the foreground. Get used to that deflating feeling. It's going to be with you for the next 120 minutes. Like the 4th assassin, Polar sucks.

Duncan (Mads Mikkelsen) is about to retire. The man known as the Black Kaiser was once the most feared assassin in the world and now he wants to live out the rest of his life in peace and with a huge pension coming his way he'll be able to do it in luxury too. His boss Mr Blut (Matt Lucas, yep him) has other ideas though. He's rather keep Duncan's pension for himself and so unleashes a crack squad of younger hungrier assassins to polish him off. Duncan and his new friend Camille (Vanessa Hudgens) are now in the line of fire.

I hated this. It's truly dreadful stuff. Mean spirited, nasty, cringeworthy, embarrassing shit. Netflix was on a good run there for a while but I've a feeling this one will be popping up in numerous bottom 10 lists come the end of the year. Just watching the opening scene I knew I was letting myself in for a world of hurt and yeah it didn't disappoint. It wants to be John Wick so badly you can taste it. A lone assassin taking on an army of them in a world where assassin organisations exist. But it doesn't have an ounce of that film's wit or style or sense of fun. Polar's idea of comedy is having a group of baddies messily gun down an obese man who's neck is too big to garrot. Bloody murder is played off as slapstick. A naked woman is killed with an axe to the head for LOLZ. The bad guy is played by, in a shockingly bad casting choice, Matt Lucas, a man about as threatening as a fuzzy wuzzy widdle bunny wabbit. The film wants us to be shocked by what he says and what he does. We're supposed to say to ourselves "Jesus, it's yer man, the only gay in the village. The drummer from Shooting Stars. Why's he pawing that woman and why is he torturing the main fella?" That's the level this shitshow is operating at.

None of it works. None of it is shocking. It's so explicit in it's violence that you'll be numb to it all after 5 minutes. Eyes are stabbed out, foreheads are drilled, dead bodies are stabbed numerous times, faces are ripped apart. It's so brutal it's almost alienating. One torture scene goes on for what feels like 10 minutes and it's for nothing, the story doesn't move on and the film stops dead while the camera can lovingly gloat over puddles of blood and lumps of torn flesh. It's just another in a long line of juvenile shock moments from director Jonas Åkerlund, the man behind the scuzzy meth drama Spun (a film so sleazy it was banned in Ireland for a while), The Prodigy's Smack  My Bitch Up video and Rammstein's infamously pornographic clip Pussy. It feels like a video nasty directed by an over caffeinated child who got his hand's on Daddy's wallet.

There was the bones of an interesting story here. A hitman trying to go straight but haunted by his past. You could have had an interesting bit of psychological drama to play with here. Can a violent man leave his past behind him? Is redemption possible? Nope, Jonas Akerlund plays it all out as broadly and offensively as possible. I know it's based on a comic but it's ok to change things for the better ya know? The gang of assassins going after Duncan are the worst people you'll see onscreen this year. They're like the Vengaboys with machine guns, all screaming and quirky posturing and cleavage. Every time they appear you'll hate yourself a little bit more for continuing to sit through this garbage. It's biggest sin is wasting an actor as interesting as Mads Mikkelsen. The big brooding Scandinavian actor who makes every thing he appears in better by just being there fails here. He's good but here he's bundled with a character that just can't be saved in a story that's been done a million times before.

Avoid. Seriously, don't watch this. You'll save yourself a big headache and a need to shower in bleach.