In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.

In short: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

In the near future, the world is on the brink of war – or really, a lot of wars everywhere – caused by an energy crisis. There is still one international attempt at solving the world’s energy troubles in form of a highly experimental particle accelerator built in Earth’s orbit. However, the crew of scientists (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, John Ortiz, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhan Ziyi) can’t quite seem to crack the problem. Time is running out, and tensions between the crew members as well as on Earth rise. Things really start to go to crap when one of the last possible attempts with the accelerator actually seems to succeeds, only with something happening to the station that turns things decidedly weird. Not to speak of the little fact that our protagonists seem to have lost Earth.

Ironically, that isn’t even the most troubling problem our protagonists now encounter. The station seems to take on a life of its own, its walls shifting and moving and even starting to become a bit nippy. And let’s not even talk about the woman (Elizabeth Debicki) the crew finds in one of the station’s walls who says she’s a member of the team. A member nobody seems to remember, but who sometimes appears and disappears in photographs of the crew, for that matter.

After five minutes of intense hype, Julius Onah’s Netflix entry in the Cloverfield universe got a right critical drubbing from mainstream critics. Me, I found myself enjoying the film just fine, sometimes even more than that, but I can understand why not only mainstream critics but also people who actually have a clue about fantastic genre film aren’t terribly happy with the movie at hand. It is, after all, impossible to deny that Paradox does waste quite a few interesting ideas and a wonderful cast on a very standard plot with a very standard finale and on in general not terribly interesting characters. There’s much more – and much stranger things – to be done with its conceit of alternative universes and I wish the film had given more characters than just Mbatha-Raw’s reason to be emotionally involved with the alternative universe they find themselves in. Or, you know, had brought them into a universe that’s just stranger than the one we got.

On the other hand, the actors are good fun in the roles they actually have, and the plot, while not as interesting as I would have hoped for, does hit its standard beats expertly enough. I also like the way the film kinda-sorta explains how the different Cloverfield films might relate to one another in a way that leaves the door wide open for the following Cloverfields to do whatever the hell they want.


Because I’m me, I can’t end this without mentioning the utter glee I felt once the business about the arm (the film’s true hero) started. There’s something to be said about a film that dares to do something so silly (some would say goofy) and even make it important to the plot.

Last Knights (2015)

Welcome to a deeply unspecific, randomly multi-cultural feudal fantasy world.

Evil crazy minister Gezza mott (Aksel Hennie) achieves a particularly nasty revenge on feudal lord Bartok (saintly Morgan Freeman) for a snub, leaving Bartok’s son-like retainer Raiden (Clive Owen) to execute his beloved master, dissolving the whole Bartok clan and “disavowing” all his warrior caste knights. Instead of swearing bloody revenge, the former Bartok men fall into lives of menial work and – in Raiden’s case – dissolute drunkenness. Still, it takes years to finally convince even the paranoid Gezza mott (don’t ask me about the names in this one) and his main retainer Ito (Tsuyoshi Ihara) that no revenge is coming from these guys. If only they knew they’re in another adaptation of the Chushingura (or the 47 Ronin, if you prefer), just one that doesn’t bother to mention this pretty damn obvious source.

It’s also not a very good adaptation of said source, and not just because redoing this stuff again means inviting comparison with some of the best jidai geki to come out of Japan, though this surely doesn’t help the film much. Nor is its case improved by the fact it doesn’t really have any new perspective on its material. Which points at one of the film’s main problems, its inability to effectively transplant a story based in a very culturally specific idea of honour and duty (seriously, the philosophical concepts in the samurai code we translate to honour and duty are only very partially related to the way these words are, for example, used in the idealized version of chivalry of the European Middle Ages) into a new environment. In fact, it doesn’t even make much of an effort to do this. Instead of creating a world around the characters where their actions make sense, the film just wildly throws together signifiers of Japanese, Korean and European middle age cultures without ever seeming to spend a thought as to how these things can actually fit together to shape the characters into a form the plot needs. It’s just incredibly superficial, and robs the whole proceedings of any way to anchor its characters emotionally or culturally, and consequently never achieves much of an emotional effect; let’s not even speak of the film making any kind of argument about the things it is supposedly about.

That doesn’t stop Last Knights from making gestures pretending profundity, of course, but if there is anything to find, it is as vague as the world the story takes place in. This superficiality, as well as the hollow pretences of depth, are not exactly a surprise coming from director Kazuaki Kiriya, whose two earlier films both suffered from exactly these problems, as well as from the draggy pace Last Knight shares. Those films also featured surprisingly stilted acting from a theoretically good cast, and this, again, is what you get here from definitely capable actors like Ihara, Owen, and Morgan Freeman, who emote with all the passion of very sleepy old men. Only Aksel Hennie seems to be awake but then, where his on screen partners’ are bored, he’s just terrible; of course, given Kiriya’s dubious success with the other actors, and the atrocious dialogue he has to sprout, I suspect it’s really not his fault.

What did surprise me about Kiriya’s work here is how visually unimpressive the whole film is. Standing quite in contrast to the eye-popping insanity and visual intensity (as I see it, Kiriya’s one possible strength as a director) of Casshern and Goemon this is drab, static and clad in the usual washed-out greyish colours that spare contemporary filmmakers the need to think about the use of colour in their movies, but I spare you, imaginary frequent reader, my usual rant about that this time around.

I’m rather more disappointed with Last Knights than I would have expected, probably because on paper, a multi-cultural (South Korean and Czech production, actors from all over the world, a Japanese director) fantasy version of the Chushingura sounds like a wonderful idea to me. If only the execution weren’t so dispiriting.

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Headhunters (2011)

Original title: Hodejegerne

Corporate headhunter Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) needs a lot of money to finance his costly lifestyle and try to buy the affection of his wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund) by financing her career as an art dealer, definitely more than even the job as the proverbial asshole in a suit can make him.

To stay affluent, our rather immoral hero has found an interesting side job. During his interviews with other assholes in suits, he finagles information about the security of their homes and the state of their art collections out of them, and then proceeds - with the help of security firm drone Ove Kjikerud (Eivind Sander) - to rob them of the highlights of said art collections.

This goes rather well for Roger until he meets Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), square-jawed pretty-man, co-developer of a nano tracing agent and former special forces soldier. Apart from being much too perfect for comfort, Greve also owns a Rubens painting that's believed to be lost that he wants Diana to appraise for him. The painting makes Greve an irresistible target for Roger even though his background fairly screams "Do not fuck with this guy".

When Roger breaks into Greve's apartment he finds the painting alright, but he also finds Diana's cell right in the bedroom. It's the sort of thing to drive a man like Roger who's desperately trying to hide his inferiority complex behind a wall of money batty, though, seeing as he has just ended an extra-marital affair of his own, he really isn't in a position to complain.

From this point on, Roger's life - always more like a dance on a knife's edge - unravels with ever increasing speed, for Greve is neither the kind of guy who let's himself be robbed, nor somebody who cares about killing anyone who might get in his way (and any bystanders if he feels like it). Soon enough, Roger is on the run, yet Greve somehow manages to find him wherever he turns. Roger not only has to avoid a guy who is an actual sociopath (in contrast to himself, who only ever aspired to be one), but also learns the truths behind the lies he built his life on.

Director Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (based on a novel by Jo Nesbø) is quite the film. Call me conceited, but I didn't exactly peg Norway as a country suited to coming up with the next great chase thriller with fine side-lines in black humour and paranoia. As is so often the case, I was wrong, and have now found chase thriller nirvana in form of a Norwegian movie.

The most important element in this sort of film is obviously a sense of pacing. Tyldum starts his film up at a merry jog, quickly establishing the characters and the basic situation while still showing complexities that will become important during the course of the movie. With things being established, the film fastly moves on to the first crisis point, escalates from there with incredible style and verve, all the while going through often exceedingly clever, always exceedingly well-timed twists and turns, never letting the tension drop for a second even when the running and the violence stop for a moment - for that's when the paranoia steps up to the plate. In that respect, Headhunters is very close to genre-companions made in the 70s, but instead of trying to be retro, Tyldum's film uses contemporary filmmaking techniques without looking like a tech demonstration or a bad video clip.

As if that weren't enough (and really, being clever and perfectly paced would be enough to recommend the film highly), Headhunters also manages the difficult trick of building up its protagonist as a complete jerk, yet still letting the audience root for him. At first, I found something grimly satisfying at seeing Roger's life unravel, but the further the story developed, and the more Roger lost, the more I began rooting for him, and the - formerly buried - humanity his reactions to his plight revealed. Much of my reaction is based on Aksel Hennie's performance that shows the frail humanity Roger hides behind his asshole attitude without ever actually making him nice. The character's psychology is actually a bit too simple for my tastes (too many writers - for the screen or not - love to motivate everything about a character through one single Big Thing - something that's clearly useful for plotting reasons, but that I don't believe to be true for actual human beings; and that thing about stripping a character of everything they have to reveal their humanity isn't exactly new either), yet in the hands of Hennie - and the excellent foils the rest of the cast make for him - this simplicity seems grounded in more complex feelings and reasons.

So, all in all, it's pretty fair to describe Headhunters as "awesome". It is, after all, a fantastic chase thriller that also happens to have its heart in the right place.

 

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