Sounds like something from a movie.

Jo Nesbo's Headhunters

(2011)

A corporate headhunter moonlights as an art thief is the unlikely premise for this Nordic offering. The result is an economically told thriller that marries pitch black comedy with edge of the seat tension. The premise is batty enough, before events start escalating out of Roger Brown's control when he discovers he picked the wrong person to steal from. Askel Hennie plays the slippery little (his size is remarked upon several times) bastard you can't help rooting for, and his boggle-eyed amazement at each successive event worsening his predicament is one the film's greatest assets.

Game of Thrones' Nikolay Coster-Waldau only really needs to show up and look alternately cool and threatening as his nemesis. The tale is fairly shameless in its house of cards structure, and would likely blow away under analysis of the coincidences that need to play out for the various parties' plans to work (including a conclusion so tidy it could only happen in the movies/page-turners).

I'm not sure Jo Nesbo is prolific enough that he deserves his name before the title, and director Morten Tyldum deserves much of the credit for how lean and stylish this is. Any film that features its protagonist, covered from head to toe in shit, driving a tractor full pelt down a road with a bulldog impailed on one of its forks, is worth 100 minutes of your time.

****

Comments

Maybe he had one too many peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches.

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You absolute horror of a human being.

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I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one.

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You seem particularly triggered right now. Can you tell me what happened?

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How do you melt somebody’s lug wrench?

Starman (1984) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s unlikely SF romance. Unlikely, because the director has done nothing before or since suggesting an affinity for the romantic fairy tale, and yet he proves surprisingly attuned to Starman ’s general vibes. As do his stars and Jack Nitzsche, furnishing the score in a rare non-showing from the director-composer. Indeed, if there’s a bum note here, it’s the fairly ho-hum screenplay; the lustre of Starman isn’t exactly that of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but it’s very nearly stitching together something special from resolutely average source material.

Remember. Decision. Consequence.

Day Break (2006) (SPOILERS) Day Break is the rare series that was lucky to get cancelled. And not in a mercy-killing way. It got to tell its story. Sure, apparently there were other stories. Other days to break. But would it have justified going there? Or would it have proved tantalising/reticent about the elusive reason its protagonist has to keep stirring and repeating? You bet it would. Offering occasional crumbs, and then, when it finally comes time to wrap things up, giving an explanation that satisfies no one/is a cop out/offers a hint at some nebulous existential mission better left to the viewer to conjure up on their own. Best that it didn’t even try to go there.

You cut my head off a couple of dozen times.

Boss Level (2021) (SPOILERS) Lest you thought it was nigh-on impossible to go wrong with a Groundhog Day premise, Joe Carnahan, in his swaggering yen for overkill, very nearly pulls it off with Boss Level . I’m unsure quite what became of Carnahan’s early potential, but he seems to have settled on a sub-Tarantino, sub-Bay, sub-Snyder, sub-Ritchie butch bros aesthetic, complete with a tin ear for dialogue and an approach to plotting that finds him continually distracting himself, under the illusion it’s never possible to have too much. Of whatever it is he’s indulging at that moment.

We got two honkies out there dressed like Hassidic diamond merchants.

The Blues Brothers (1980) (SPOILERS) I had limited awareness of John Belushi’s immense mythos before The Blues Brothers arrived on retail video in the UK (so 1991?) My familiarity with SNL performers really began with Ghostbusters ’ release, which meant picking up the trail of Jake and Elwood was very much a retrospective deal. I knew Animal House , knew Belushi’s impact there, knew 1941 (the Jaws parody was the best bit), knew Wired was a biopic better avoided. But the minor renaissance he, and they, underwent in the UK in the early ’90s seemed to have been initiated by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, of all things; Everybody Needs Somebody was part of their That Sounds Good to Me medley, the first of their hits not to make No.1, and Everybody ’s subsequent single release then just missed the Top Ten. Perhaps it was this that hastened CIC/Universal to putting the comedy out on video. Had the movie done the rounds on UK TV in the 80s? If so, it managed to pass me by. Even bef

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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