Norwegian executive Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) appears to have it all: a successful career as a white-shoe recruitment consultant; an extravagant modernist home in Oslo; and wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), a Nordic Amazon who is as sharp as she is stunning. However, Roger repeatedly points out the viewer in voiceover that he only 1.68 m tall (that’s 5 ft., 5 in., for the American viewer), and not exactly an Adonis where his looks are concerned. Roger’s sagging self-esteem entraps him in a state of perpetual crisis, prompting him to spend money extravagantly on his wife. His financial woes in turn have led him into a double life as an art thief, in which he and corrupt security grunt Ove (Eivind Sander) collaborate to swipe and replace paintings from private collections.
Even with such criminal moonlighting, Roger is barely treading water, and his clingy mistress Lotte (Julie Ølgaard) is only adding to his anxiety. It is roughly at this point that Dutch electronics executive and lantern-jawed ex-military man Clas Greve (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) crosses paths with Roger. Not only is the dashing Greve a perfect fit for Roger’s latest client—a GPS company in search of a new CEO—but he just happens to have a lost, priceless painting by Peter Paul Rubens stashed in his Oslo apartment.
Suffice to say that from there, director Morten Tyldum’s new thriller Headhunters takes a positively ludicrous numbers of twists and turns, almost to the point of bloody-minded self-parody. However, despite the fact that Roger’s anti-heroic travails might flirt shamelessly with Coen-flavored “fiasco comedy,” screenwriters Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg can’t seem to shake the gravely sincere mood that is the herring-and-potatoes of contemporary Scandinavian noir. Regardless of whether this schizophrenic quality is present in the original novel by Jo Nesbø, Headhunters the film feels fatally fractured in tone, in spite of of the nerve-wracking exhilaration it achieves in its better moments. Moreover, like the curiously praised 2006 French thriller Tell No One, Headhunters is overburdened with plot leaps and holes that strain the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief.
What appeal the film possesses derives principally from Vidar Flataukan’s crackerjack editing, an effectively tense score from Tron Bjerknes and Jeppe Kaas, and actor Hennie, who conveys an alluring kind of reprehensible loser-heroism. None of these, however, can overcome the film’s carelessly disjointed mood, or is preposterous accumulation of improbabilities. The most memorable mystery that Headhunters offers is whether the cavalier narrative hand waving in the epilogue represents cunning misdirection or outright laziness.
St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.
