Headhunters

Hot on the trail of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and all that jazz) and hit TV show “The Killing,” Morten Tyldum’s “Headhunters” attempts to further quench our ongoing fascination with Scandinavian crime fiction, and does so with much success. As based on the Jo Nesbø novel of the same name, it is a crime thriller somewhat in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s" trilogy and the works of the Coen Brothers, most notably their 1996 masterpiece “Fargo.” But while “Headhunters” owes much of its slick style and cheeky sense of humour to its American counterparts, at its core it is deeply and authentically Scandinavian, an attribute that only helps to make it all the more fascinating.

Take the film’s one and only car chase, for example, shared between our hero and his relentless pursuer. While a Hollywood production would surely handle such a scene by pinning one squeaky-clean supercar against another, “Headhunters” pins a gas-guzzling SUV against a lumbering, dirt-splattered tractor. Not only that, but the forks of the tractor are morbidly decorated with a recently impaled dead pitbull, and its driver, our petrified hero, is smeared from head to toe in human feces. I dunno about you, but I for one highly doubt that the upcoming American remake starring “Marky Mark” Wahlberg won’t make one or two minor changes.

The aforementioned poop-covered hero is the aptly named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), who, before being covered in poop, is an accomplished headhunter and a highly skilled art thief. At 1.68 metres tall (as pointed out in his captivating narration), he suffers from something of a Napoleon complex, overcompensating for his limited stature with a gorgeous trophy wife, a luxuriant blonde mane, a confident and ruthless demeanour, and a home in Oslo that looks like it was designed by Pablo Picasso.

Living a financially draining lifestyle, he is chin-deep (well, he is rather small) in piles of debt which not even his frequent art thievery can quite pay off. But when he discovers that a new acquaintance, the devilishly handsome and irresistibly charismatic Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), has in his possession a Rubens painting possibly worth 100 million NOK, Roger sees an eye-popping opportunity to finally relieve himself of his crippling money worries.

Roger’s methods of art thievery aren’t exactly up to the intricately elaborate standards of Thomas Crown, Roger simply going into the victim’s home while they are elsewhere, removing a Munch from its frame, replacing it with a convincing forgery and legging it with the original, all while clad in a ninja costume. Helping him in his missions by tampering with home security systems is Ove (Eivind Sander), a sleazy security guard hopelessly enamoured with cans of beer and deeply in love with a Russian prostitute. How European.

Financial rewards aside, Roger’s latest scheme seems just like any other, and is intended to unfold like any other, i.e. without any cock-ups. But when the operation is underway in Greve’s apartment, Roger stumbles upon something that turns the whole situation upside down, leading to a nerve-shredding chase across Norway and a stomach-churning onslaught of blood-soaked violence, knife-wielding battles and vehicle-flying chaos that surrounds the film’s nail-biting second half.

Sprinting along at the pace of a sugar-snorting greyhound, “Headhunters” is heart-racingly thrilling and electrifyingly entertaining. It is a proper thriller, its plot littered with heart-stopping twists and paced with an efficient balance between action, suspense, jet-black comedy and tear-soaked drama. It is wholly absorbing too, from the sleekly polished opening to the blood-spurting climax, never failing to entertain for a single moment of its 100-minute runtime.

Entertaining too is our leading man; Hennie, an award-winning Norwegian actor, gains the audience’s sympathy as a man who, in most actors’ hands, would not be particularly sympathetic. Roger is a white-collar thief and a vain, self-serving prick who cares not for his wife’s pleas for a child or for the people from whom he is casually stealing. And yet we feel sorry for him as he clumsily tumbles his way through a downward spiral, Roger on the verge of having a meltdown as everything around him goes horrendously, and violently, wrong, leaving him driving through the countryside in a stolen tractor, brandishing a nasty-looking dog bite and covered in doodoo.

Grisly and gruesome, cool and slick, and occasionally berserk (perhaps to a fault), “Headhunters” is a biting satire of male inadequacy, a gripping adaptation of Nesbø's international bestseller and a thrilling new import from the evidently crime-ridden Scandinavia. Colour me curious about the Stateside redo, but unless they have David friggin’ Fincher at the helm, Hollywood certainly has its work cut out in topping this. Your move, Tinseltown.

8/10