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

You know, I think you may have the delusion you’re still a police officer.

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Without Remorse (2021) (SPOILERS) Without Remorse is an apt description of the unapologetic manner in which Amazon/Paramount have perpetrated this crime upon any audiences foolish enough to think there was any juice left in the Tom Clancy engine. There certainly shouldn’t have been, not after every attempt was made to run it dry in The Sum of All Our Fears and then the stupidly titled Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit . A solo movie of sometime Ryan chum John Clark’s exploits has been mooted awhile now, and two more inimitable incarnations were previously encountered in the forms of Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber. Like Chris Pine in Shadow Recruit , however, diminishing returns find Michael B Jordan receiving the short straw and lead one to the conclusion that, if Jordan is indeed a “star”, he’s having a hell of a job proving it.

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Too Many Crooks (1959) (SPOILERS) The sixth of seven collaborations between producer-director Mario Zampi and writer Michael Pertwee, Too Many Crooks scores with a premise later utilised to big box-office effect in Ruthless People (1986). A gang of inept thieves kidnap the wife of absolute cad and bounder Billy Gordon (Terry-Thomas). Unfortunately for them, Gordon, being an absolute cad and bounder, sees it as a golden opportunity, rather enjoying his extra-marital carry ons and keeping all his cash from her, so he refuses to pay up. At which point Lucy Gordon (Brenda De Banzie) takes charge of the criminal crew and turns the tables.

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The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970) (SPOILERS) No, not Joseph P Farrell’s book about the Nazi secret weapons project, but rather a first-rate TV movie in the secret-society ilk of later flicks The Skulls and The Star Chamber . Only less flashy and more cogent. Glenn Ford’s professor discovers the club he joined 22 years earlier is altogether more hardcore than he could have ever imagined – not some student lark – when they call on the services he pledged. David Karp’s adaptation of his novel, The Brotherhood of the Bell is so smart in its twists and turns of plausible deniability, you’d almost believe he had insider knowledge.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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