Polar is a 2019 action film about the world’s top assassin settling into retirement when his former employer marks him as a liability.
Ugh. I sit here slightly devastated, saddened by the flopped expectation I had going into director Jonas Åkerlund‘s Polar, a widely uninhibited farce of a movie that fails to deliver any proper punch to its story and its audience anything worthy to chew on. While it’s populated with a host of colorful characters and every last hope for adrenaline-rushing good times, it is an unimaginative and vapid experience that wears out its welcome in the first scene.
Duncan Vizla (Mads Mikkelsen) is getting on in years, looking to retire from a rather stressful job, that of a world class assassin working for an organization called Damocles, run by a fellow named Blut (Matt Lucas). The good news about his decision is that the pension plan is solid, leaving him a fortune to spend his days alone in the wilds of Montana with pretty neighbor Camille (Vanessa Hudgens) living nearby. The bad news is that Blut is broke and can’t afford to pay his top killer and so, figuring it easier, sends his next tier assassins to do him in. Can he outwit the A-Team of murders and save his relationship with Camille?
There’s nothing wrong with a little bluntness in telling a story, a sledgehammer sometimes just thing in giving a bit of destruction to a story, but there is a sense that this is the only tool available in Åkerlund’s kit, the movie not just lacking subtlety, outright stomping all over it. Maybe we can’t really blame him for such, the trend of big, bold, and bloody a popular crutch to lean on and in the right hands, effective. However, with everything under it thin as wet paper, there’s no joy in the carnage.
Based on the 2012 webcomic and graphic novels by Victor Santos, Polar seems a sure fit for a film adaptation, yet the hyperbolic speed and extreme attention to violence without emotional meaning has no serious impact, the whole thing kind of rote. I do enjoy a good over-the-top bloody thriller, but if I don’t care about anyone on either side of the gushing crimson, it simply doesn’t matter. That goes for Duncan as well, who is packed with potential in the always eager to see Mikkelsen but has little room to give the brooding assassin any breadth. There’s only so far ‘exhausted’ will get you.
While the story might give some hope for a more worldly affair (we start “somewhere in Chile” before traipsing about various locales), it’s all too used up and anonymous, nothing about these settings or reasons to be there making them memorable. It’s just a seemingly endless conveyor belt of been-there done-that, wallowing in the same tired clichés we’ve seen countless times before. And weirdly, despite all the love for in-your-face bloodshed, it’s neither convincing enough to be uncomfortable or comical enough to be fun.
We’re better than this. Honestly. We’re smarter than this, too. Movies in this genre have properly evolved into brutal exercises in symbolic disorder that, even as they entertain, challenge. Not so here. Polar slumps about in the lower rungs, unable to be innovative or even a little clever with so much about it that could be. Give this a confident pass.