Polar (2019) movie review

Overall verdict: 6.5/10

Nothing to do with our melting ice caps

The Good: Stylish action, memorable characters, great acting, lots of dark humour

The Bad: cliched plot, lack of character development, clashing tone

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With a title like “POLAR” you’d imagine something set in the chilling arctic circle or on freezing Antarctica. While snow does feature in some scenes, this movie has nothing to do with the frigid imagery a title like POLAR conjures up. Instead, POLAR may be describing the movie’s tone and style; a mixture of 2 very different tones literal polar opposites of each other.

On one hand, we have the plottings of the deliciously decadent and devious Mr Blut, played by Matt Lucas (Alice in Wonderland), who runs his own hitman-for-hire organization called Damocles. He’s a greedy nut, Mr Blut is, and plans to inflate his company’s value by killing off all retiring hitmen before they retire so that he would not have to pay their pension. To do this dirty work he enlists a new team of colorful crazy assassins, each one as weird as the next almost to the point of being caricatures. Scenes involving Blut or his assassins are shot in this saturated brightly coloured style calling to mind parodies and R Rated cartoons.

On the other hand, we have retiring hitman Vizla aka the Black Kaiser, played by Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) one of the best in the business. And he’s days from retirement and his fat pension payout. Vizla’s subplot meanders a bit in the first act showing his failed attempts at reintegrating with normal society, being a good neighbor to the timid Camille, played by Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical)  and taking up regular jobs or hobbies, often with darkly humorous results. His scenes, mostly confined to a snowy mountain town, are nearly devoid of colours other than stark white and varying shades of grey and brown.

Once Vizla is finally tracked down and cornered, the action is swift and very satisfactory. We see how Vizla’s old fashioned ways and experience outsmart and overpower the new assassins’ gimmicks and flashy tactics. The action and the way it’s shot is the high point of this movie. That and the inherent craziness of what Vizla is up against separates this movie from the whole “retired badass forced into a new fight and winning by his experience” genre that seems overdone in a film market trying to cash in on the popularity of the TAKEN and JOHN WICK franchises.

If you can get over the clashing styles of gritty and cartoony, POLAR is a cool albeit cliched movie. We have seen it all before with this movie being light on plot and light on developing its main character beyond the simplest single statement character description of “retired hitman who can’t reintegrate”. It is however great fun, never boring, and full of that dark humour that I love.

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Entertainment: A-

Story: C-

Acting: A

Characters: B-

Music: C-

Replay value: B+

"Brains": C-