The lead in the Norwegian export Headhunters has a serious Napoleon complex. Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) may be one of Norway's most successful "headhunters", or high-end corporate recruiters, but the first thing he tells us about himself is that he's 5,6' - not tall enough, he thinks. Roger suffers from a general sense of inferiority. He worries that he doesn't make enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle for his statuesque wife, so he steals expensive art from his clients to make ends meet. Even still, he's gone into debt to keep their sleek, elegant house, but Roger sees this pampering as a requisite for his marriage. After all, there are always plenty of men taller than 5,6'.
Headhunters is much more secure in its modest stature than Roger, and better for it. A twisty and slickly executed thriller featuring a compromised, flawed man on the run, this Morten Tyldum film benefits from a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but to have some bloody-minded fun nevertheless. The film benefits in particular from a black sense of humor, the occasional stroke of mad genius and a surprisingly comforting quality.
Roger interviews candidates in his capacity as a corporate recruiter; while doing so, he verbally scouts their art collections. He asks them if they own any expensive art by way of an anecdote, and also asks if they have a family at home (in case anybody might disrupt the theft). Roger has a partner, Ove (Elvind Sander) who dismantles the alarms before Roger goes in and steals the artwork personally. One wonders whether these methods would work on repeat; I can picture corporate victims of art theft recounting the story of the headhunter who always uses the same weirdly specific artwork anecdote.
Indeed, Roger's transparency gets him into trouble. At the opening of her art gallery, Roger's wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) introduces him to the dashing Clas Greve (Jaime Lannister), whom Roger immediately recognizes as an excellent candidate for one of his biggest clients, a GPS company called Pathfinder. At their next meeting, he also realizes that Clas is in possession of a valuable piece of art, making him a prime candidate for Roger's night job. Roger steals the art, but Clas smells a rat immediately. Inconveniently, it turns out that Clas, besides being devastatingly handsome and charming, is also ex-special ops; for the diminutive Roger, cat and mouse becomes a fitting term. When he realizes he's been outed, Roger hits the road, but not before discovering Diana's phone in Clas's bed. Under the impression that he's been betrayed by everybody he knows (and frazzled by Clas's mysterious ability to track him down wherever he goes), Roger goes completely underground.
The film plays to these dramas with varying degrees of sincerity. Confident and rugged, Nikolai Coster-Waldau is perfectly cast as a deviant threat to Roger's insecurities, but descends into something of a stock bogeyman after the first act of the film. As a sly mystery thriller, however, Headhunters does well for itself, buoyed by a few genuinely inventive action pieces and kept limber by Tyldum's taste for blackly comic violence. During one scene in particular, at a remote wooded farmhouse where Clas has cornered Roger, Headhunters hurtles into slasher tropes with a self-aware flair that '90s-era Wes Craven would admire. Especially gruesome use is made of a tractor, and not in the way you expect. It is sequences like these, of grisly violence with a streak of winking black humor, that get you to realize that this is a warmer film and in better fun than the austere, menacing set decoration and high-stakes set-up suggest.
This warmth comes through the most in Roger and Diana's relationship. It appears as though the film is setting up Roger's liberation from his icy, conniving wife, but this plot thread takes an unexpectedly tender twist, one that teaches Roger the simple but important lesson of being comfortable with who you are. A story about a marriage as much as anything else, Headhunters turns into a fast-paced exercise in violently ridding oneself of personal demons rather than succumbing to them. It's a welcome alternative to interesting but increasingly predictable Breaking Bad-inspired sagas of mild-mannered men turning to the dark side. That Headhunters nevertheless has some twisted fun on the way to real reconciliation makes it an odd mix of the kind-hearted and the breakneck. You'll enjoy yourself and you might even get a feel out of it.
Headhunters is much more secure in its modest stature than Roger, and better for it. A twisty and slickly executed thriller featuring a compromised, flawed man on the run, this Morten Tyldum film benefits from a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but to have some bloody-minded fun nevertheless. The film benefits in particular from a black sense of humor, the occasional stroke of mad genius and a surprisingly comforting quality.
Roger interviews candidates in his capacity as a corporate recruiter; while doing so, he verbally scouts their art collections. He asks them if they own any expensive art by way of an anecdote, and also asks if they have a family at home (in case anybody might disrupt the theft). Roger has a partner, Ove (Elvind Sander) who dismantles the alarms before Roger goes in and steals the artwork personally. One wonders whether these methods would work on repeat; I can picture corporate victims of art theft recounting the story of the headhunter who always uses the same weirdly specific artwork anecdote.
Indeed, Roger's transparency gets him into trouble. At the opening of her art gallery, Roger's wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) introduces him to the dashing Clas Greve (Jaime Lannister), whom Roger immediately recognizes as an excellent candidate for one of his biggest clients, a GPS company called Pathfinder. At their next meeting, he also realizes that Clas is in possession of a valuable piece of art, making him a prime candidate for Roger's night job. Roger steals the art, but Clas smells a rat immediately. Inconveniently, it turns out that Clas, besides being devastatingly handsome and charming, is also ex-special ops; for the diminutive Roger, cat and mouse becomes a fitting term. When he realizes he's been outed, Roger hits the road, but not before discovering Diana's phone in Clas's bed. Under the impression that he's been betrayed by everybody he knows (and frazzled by Clas's mysterious ability to track him down wherever he goes), Roger goes completely underground.
The film plays to these dramas with varying degrees of sincerity. Confident and rugged, Nikolai Coster-Waldau is perfectly cast as a deviant threat to Roger's insecurities, but descends into something of a stock bogeyman after the first act of the film. As a sly mystery thriller, however, Headhunters does well for itself, buoyed by a few genuinely inventive action pieces and kept limber by Tyldum's taste for blackly comic violence. During one scene in particular, at a remote wooded farmhouse where Clas has cornered Roger, Headhunters hurtles into slasher tropes with a self-aware flair that '90s-era Wes Craven would admire. Especially gruesome use is made of a tractor, and not in the way you expect. It is sequences like these, of grisly violence with a streak of winking black humor, that get you to realize that this is a warmer film and in better fun than the austere, menacing set decoration and high-stakes set-up suggest.
This warmth comes through the most in Roger and Diana's relationship. It appears as though the film is setting up Roger's liberation from his icy, conniving wife, but this plot thread takes an unexpectedly tender twist, one that teaches Roger the simple but important lesson of being comfortable with who you are. A story about a marriage as much as anything else, Headhunters turns into a fast-paced exercise in violently ridding oneself of personal demons rather than succumbing to them. It's a welcome alternative to interesting but increasingly predictable Breaking Bad-inspired sagas of mild-mannered men turning to the dark side. That Headhunters nevertheless has some twisted fun on the way to real reconciliation makes it an odd mix of the kind-hearted and the breakneck. You'll enjoy yourself and you might even get a feel out of it.
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