Polar (2019)
(Netflix Streaming, December 2020) Circa-2020 cinema has a number of issues, but the one that sticks into my craw is the sharp uptick in psychopathic gory comedy in the past few years. There’s now a constant stream of R-rated comedies that seem eager to supplement their funny gags with gag-inducing violence, and the blending of the two isn’t complementary as much as it’s indicative of some deep-rooted psychopathy from the filmmakers. While I think that there’s a place for gore and comedy in films such as the John Wick series, or in Zombieland: Double Tap, it’s all about tone, and movies that can’t control their tone end up feeling like mental ward escapees. There’s no need to figure limb amputation as a comic device in The Spy Who Dumped Me, for instance, or to spoil what could have been a decent enough action film in Polar with a near-intolerable amount of gore, death and gratuitous meanness. Mads Mikkelsen stars as an assassin about to retire from “Damocles,” an organization employing hitmen for the highest bidders. But HR problems are about to catch up with him once Damocles realizes the savings they could make by eliminating him before he cashes his pension. This goofy opening sequence drives much of the tone of Polar’s imagined universe, except badly: Compared to the far more successful worldbuilding of the John Wick series, Polar can’t keep its stories straight nor be disciplined about how it’s going to go about it. Even the opening sequence sets a discordant tone with its off-kilter proportions of violence and comedy: There’s too little comedy for too much violence, and Polar doesn’t feel as edgy as pathetic in the way it indulges teenage conceptions of what an R-rated film should contain. It doesn’t help that the story goes in overtime to tie itself up in unnecessary knots, further proving the unreality of its universe. Director Jonas Åkerlund does have a keen instinct for fluidly moving narratives (although there’s a big, big lull in the third quarter), but he would be better served by better scripts. In parallel, I sure hope that everyone soon burns out on extreme violence in otherwise adequate films – there’s a race to the bottom there that I don’t want to see, as comedies now rival old-school horror movies for the number of exposed innards.