HEADHUNTERS

Scandinavian mysteries are all the rage right now, which might be surprising since their origin is from an area with the lowest crime rate in the world.  Jo Nesbo’s entry Headhunters (adapted by Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg, directed by Morten Tyldum) is the latest noir de jour of the soon to be remade in America genre.  The story revolves around Roger Brown, a man shorter than his Amazonian, blonde, busty and much better looking wife.  He overcompensates for his size by spending a ton of money on her (hey, it could be worse; remember when Sterling Hayden started WWIII in Dr. Strangelove because he was impotent?).  To make the money, Brown moonlights as an art thief (hey, it could happen).  By day, this contemporary Napoleon is a headhunter and he finds his life beginning to unravel when he offers Clas Greve, an ex-mercenary turned entrepreneur (as redundant as that may sound), a plum position that anyone would kill to fill (unfortunately for Roger, since Nikolaj takes that idiom all too literally).  After that, the plot goes into hyper drive as twists pile upon twists and revelations battle each other to be the most surprising.  Accompanying all this are also a few too many holes in the script, but they don’t stop the whole thing from crashing.  It’s actually a very satisfying little crime thriller, even if most of the movie seems to be how much torture can be perpetrated upon Brown; he suffers more than Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ (one shudders to think what would happen if Mel Gibson ended up helming the American version).  Askel Hennie plays Brown with a constant twinkle in his eyes; as my friend said, he looks like Christopher Walken’s younger brother.  Greve is played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (or the vice is nice, but incest is best Jamie Lannister to those who are into Game of Thrones—you know who you are) and he could be mistaken for Aaron Eckhardt’s twin brother if Nikolaj wasn’t better looking (sorry, Aaron, but that’s jut the way it is—deal with it).