Thursday, February 7, 2019

The Review: Polar


Polar 3/10

Spoilers ahead all over the place. This felt rushed. I decided to watch Polar on Netflix because I hoped it would be interesting and also so Netflix would stop shoving it in my face. While watching this I kept on thinking about how it was edited and squinting at the screen. Then as the movie progressed and I was watching how it flowed and such I had to stop and check who directed this because either this was someone's first movie or they were not used to this whole directing thing and needed to work a few kinks out. A mostly music video director. Got it. Now that that was out of my system I felt better about how this just fell apart as it went on. This is about an assassin that is about to retire and collect his assassin pension. Turns out the folks he works for owe a lot of money so they have their killers sign over their shit so when they die the company gets paid. Convoluted. The start of this movie had me gasping with delight watching this woman in a bikini set up Johnny Knoxville before he gets shot a lot. By the way, the women in this movie are fucking beautiful in so many ways. Whatever you are into they got and by you I mean me. There is this Black chick that shows up later and I was like “Uh, I need to know more about her story, please?”


So this killer Duncan Vizla played by Mads Mikkelsen also known as The Black Kaiser also known as the man that the chick you want to date but never will because she is into guys that look like a serial killer to you but are hot to them. Duncan keeps having nightmares about a job gone bad. He lives in a very small town and his nearest neighbor is this woman named Camille played by Vanessa Hudgens. I kept thinking “Please do not let them hook up.” There are some hook ups in films and such that gross me out. Thankfully they do not. The Hunter of Black Men aka Liam Neeson and Viola Davis in Widows made me cringe. So she is super shy and acts all weird but she is cute in that “I need to sleep with one eye open the first week of dating” kinda cute. Duncan ends up adopting a puppy off the street and it is cute as hell...then he blows its brains out after waking from a nightmare. This is not John Wick.


This team of killers are sent to take out Duncan and head to different places they think he lives and kills those people. They end up killing a group of thugs, a very large bearded woman, and some sex pervert. There are no cops in this movie. Gunfire is not a cause for alarm. Duncan ends up caught by an old assassin friend played by Richard Dreyfus and Duncan is then tortured for a few days before escaping and coming back to save Camille who was captured by the bad guy. The main villain is shit by the way. I don't know why anyone works for him other than he has money. He is not scary or anything. Just acts weird as hell. The team end up finally catching up to Duncan and he takes them out one by one. I am telling shit all out of order but it don't matter. Duncan ends up finally getting to the bad guy and then cuts his head off. Very unsatisfying ways to end that character after all the terrible shit he did. He kidnaps the girl, tortures Duncan for three or four days straight, and hooks the girl up to be fed drugs and has her beaten. Off screen head cut off and flung out of window. If you wonder why he has an eye patch it is because this asshole stuck a scalpel through it!


After everything is done it turns out that Camille is the daughter of the family that Duncan murdered but he did not murder her. He killed her father, mother, brother, possibly a baby, but left her. She found out he was sending her all this money and paying for stuff and now she wants to kill him. Of course she doesn't and he is going to help her find out who hired him to kill her parents. The fuck?! This could have been good. I was worried from the start with the loud texting sounds during the credits. There is this fine line movies can walk between being cool and being cheeseballs. John Wick managed to be cool despite pretty much being about a guy killing dozens of people because they killed his dog. Smokin Aces spawned a metric shit ton of movies trying to be cool and full of assassins that are different wacky characters. Hell, Smokin Aces 2 was a bad copy of the first. This movie is somewhere Colombiana and The Big Hit. Cool soundtrack though. The actors and actresses in this were good with what they had to work with meaning themselves. But the story was weak and it felt like it was trying way too hard to be cool. I totally could have not watched this and been fine.

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