Polar (2019) - Movie Review

There are many ways in which a filmmaker can screw up an action flick. Making the hero unconvincing as an action lead, making the villain unconvincing as a viable threat, making the action scenes incoherent or just plain dull to sit through, making the dialogue stringing the action together flat or threadbare, or just making the production as a whole uninteresting. In a genre built on viscera and heart-racing engagement, being boring to sit through is the worst thing an action film can be. Enter this film, which manages to one-up all of that. It’s not just boring; it’s so bafflingly constructed that it should rationally stumble into being interesting purely by accident, and yet can’t even manage to get that far.

Director Jonas Åkerlund’s main claim to fame is his work in music videos, most notably for Madonna and Lady Gaga, and there’s definitely some showing of his own sense of style here. The garish, Spring Breakers-esque colour palette feels reminiscent of the vibrant look of Bad Romance and Telephone, the sex scenes have a sophomoric gratuity that fits with his literally-pornographic video for Ramnstein’s Pussy, and the energetic bombast contrasted with gritty discomfort locks in with his work on Madonna's Let Me Tell You A Secret.

The man not only has a decent pedigree under his belt, he’s shown ability with letting sheer personality fill the frame and make for entertaining work. A pity, then, that this largely feels like he’s chasing trends that aren’t his own. Its depiction of the Damacles assassin agency feels like watered-down John Wick, the scenes of Mads Mikkelsen’s Duncan in snowy Montana make The Snowman look enthralling and completed, the overblown scenes of the Damacles agents trying and failing to hunt him down look like something Neveldine/Taylor would abandon for being too adolescent, and for a director who got his start in music videos, the attempts to meld music with the action on-screen are fucking laughable. I don’t know what’s worse: The drawn-out four-day torture-a-thon, or the notion that what it really needed to be effective was bagpipe music in the background.

The acting in this thing sucks too; not even Mikkelsen can save this thing. He certainly sells the hardened warrior aspect of his character, but when the film spends more time showing him teaching knife tricks to school-children than actually fighting anyone, it can only go down from here. Katheryn Winnick as Duncan’s handler mainly lets her ever-changing wigs do the emoting for her, Ruby O. Fee as the de-facto leader of the group hunting Duncan down is mostly the avatar for what this film deems as sexy (read: ass first, development never), and Matt Lucas as the big bad villain… even though he and Jonas have worked together before on Small Apartments, it’s still confounding why he’s in this thing. He tries for eccentric yet threatening, but only serves to further highlight the raw idiocy of his character. Even in the aforementioned torture scene, he never escapes the air of Little Britain floating around him.

Oh yeah, the story in this is utterly backwash as well. It goes for the standard ‘retiring mercenary goes on one last mission’ conceit, but since the impetus for it is killing him off so that Damacles can cash in on his retirement pension, it somehow takes such a textbook tired narrative idea and somehow make it even worse. The pacing is dreadful, taking a full hour into this two-hour effort for Mikkelsen to even get involved in the main plot proper. Otherwise, it’s intercutting between him trying to enjoy retired life, and the Damacles crew shooting people who aren’t Duncan. Riveting. As in I’d rather be shot with a rivet gun than have to sit through this.

And on top of all that, the action isn’t even any good. Jonas and cinematographer Pär M. Ekberg seem to have no real idea how to present shoot-outs and fight scenes effectively, to the point where the scene transitions and on-screen character naming ends up revealing more personality than any of the bloodshed. Always going for the literal low-blows, and thinking that pumping holes into an overweight guy is the height of dark comedy, it shows zero flair and just about zero competency in making heavy violence look anything other than something to fall asleep to.

I’ll put it this way: John Wick’s dog is killed by thugs who raid his home, setting him on his path of vengeance. Duncan shoots his own dog by accident, after a dream sequence that isn’t so much edited as it is the result of several USB drives being chewed up and spat out by a wood chipper. It is almost impossible to believe just how bad this is, as it clearly has a lot of stylistic reference points to explain why it looks the way it does, and yet even dissecting that aspect of the production isn’t enough to make this worth sitting through in any way. It is easily one of the worst action films I’ve ever reviewed on here, and the fact that it can’t even provide ironic entertainment is frankly astounding to me.