TJE 7/9 – Headhunters (2011)

Every once in a while, I end up ahead of the curve, and I think this is one of those cases. I intended to see the Norwegian thriller "Headhunters" when it hit DVD in August, but I found it playing at my local art house theater, and I was in the mood for something bloody, so why not? "Headhunters" didn't disappoint. It's the kind of movie that action genre fans love, very gritty, very bloody, with a tight story. I expect that you'll be hearing a lot about it over the next few months as people discover it. At the time of writing, it's already in the process of being remade by Hollywood.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a high level corporate headhunter with some major insecurities, about his short stature, about his background, and about his place in the world. He overcompensates by living an exorbitantly luxurious lifestyle, sparing no expense to keep his beautiful wife Diana (Synnøve Macody) happy. To pay the bills, Roger moonlights as an art thief, partnering with a colorful gun-enthusiast named Ove (Eivind Sander). Through his job, Roger finds privately owned artwork, and Ove carries out the heists. One day, Roger happens upon a major opportunity – his latest candidate, Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from "Game of Thrones"), owns a Rubens painting that is worth millions. However, as the heist proceeds, and things start to go wrong, Roger begins to suspect that he's gotten in over his head.

You don't realize how rare it is to find a really well plotted, well developed crime thriller until you see one like this that gets everything right. Too often, heist films and action films are built around the same kind of sympathetic everyman criminal. Not so with "Headhunters," which gives us a really memorable protagonist in Roger Brown. He's an insecure, jealous reprobate who steals because he has some major personal issues that he's never addressed, and this is absolutely integral to what happens in the story. His relationship with Diana, which could have been such a perfunctory plot device, is instead seriously delved into and dissected before our eyes. This is the kind of heist film that features actual character arcs and personal growth. It's so smartly written, "Headhunters" is a very satisfying watch on a purely dramatic level.

So when the crazy-ass stuff happens, and rest assured action fans that it does happen frequently, it's not just violence for its own sake. Be warned that this is very much an R-rated film, and there's a good amount of blood and gore. It's not over-the-top, but the fights and shootouts get very brutal, the aftermath is often shown up close, and there's one particular scene of animal cruelty that is not going to go over well with the faint-hearted viewer. It's all grounded well enough in reality that the impact hits a lot harder than in similar American films, where the violence always come off as slightly artificial and orchestrated. "Headhunters" does not have this problem at all. After seeing some Australian and Scandinavian crime films that use the same style, I really like this approach.

Aksel Hennie carries the film. He doesn't come across as the kind of leading man you'd want for such an action-heavy film at first, especially next to the more conventionally attractive Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, but boy does he deliver when it counts. The film requires him to play intimate dramatic scenes, to be extremely physical and intense, to go from seething, jealous bastard to achingly vulnerable and distraught. He gets to be both the villain and victim and he easily keeps your attention, even if you're not sure whether you're rooting for Roger or not. Everyone else in the cast does a good job keeping pace with him. Coster-Waldau is appropriately menacing, and Synnøve Macody gets the most out of her few but vital scenes.

I really appreciate a film that can surprise me, and "Headhunters" managed to do it several times, and not in the conventional ways. What I thought was going to be a fairly simple, straightforward heist film went off in directions I wasn't expecting at all, and it changed gears like that several times throughout the film, so I was never sure where it was going next. And it knew exactly what it was doing, leaving no loose ends or ambiguities. "Headhunters" has some pretty wild and implausible plot twists, that really strain believability, but the script makes it work and leaves no loose ends.

If this sounds like your kind of movie, I urge you to see "Headhunters" in its original Norwegian in any way that you can, before Hollywood remakes it and replaces Aksel Hennie with Jason Statham or Sam Worthington. It's one of the best examples of the genre I've seen in a while, and it's worth the effort to go track down.
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