Headhunters

Synopsis; Top gun coporate headhunter, Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), lives the good life with his beautiful wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund). To support his top drawer lifestyle he has a sideline in stealing art from his well-heeled job applicants. However when he chooses Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as his mark things go horribly wrong as Greve is a lot smarter than his usual mark.

There are two main ingredients for a good thriller. One is a plot that twists and turns without completely demolishing our credulity. The other is tightly-paced atmospheric direction. Headhunters scores well on the second point, not so well on the first.

Although quite standard for this kind of Scandinavian fare (thus the film is being touted as being “from the producers of the [original] The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”) built as it is on shifts between urban and backwoods settings, the shiny surface of things and the corruption beneath, it is efficiently done with a strong opening that introduces us directly to the main character and the yarn that he is, with the benefit of hindsight, about to tell us.

Director Tyldum keeps the early part of the film low key and cool with Aksel Hennie, with his sandy-blond Paul Bettany looks, a quite different and engaging main character as a corporate recruiter who steals Old Master paintings in order to sustain his expensive lifestyle. Synnøve Macody Lund as his high maintenance wife is a typical leggy blonde, little more than a background figure. The other main character is Clas Greve. Here the appearance of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau with his more classically macho good looks is a worry. Even more so when it turns out that he’s a former hot-shot paramilitary dude  And indeed from this point the level of action rises and the plot begins to strain our credulity as these two battle it out in a series of permutations which, despite a couple of rationalizing expositional scenes, depend on a heck of a lot of co-incidences and convenient contiguities, not just in the details of the plot but also in the underpinning conceptual framework. In the latter respect one never really understands Greve’s motivation and even when one at last discovers it, it seems out-of-kilter with the extremity of his actions.

If Headhunters is far from extraordinary, the fact that the cast are unfamiliar to us mitigates the formulaic nature of the plot and Tyldum’s efficient direction carries off its improbabilities, thus largely deferring the inevitable questions until after the closing credits.

 

 

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