Polar – Colourful comic carnage

Even since Liam Neeson put down his pipe and slippers and started wiping out scores of henchmen at least a third of his age (ala ‘Taken’) there’s been a bit of a trend in Hollywood action films to cast an older hero in the lead.  I’ve seen films where Sean Penn and Nicholas Cage basically follow in Neeson’s footsteps and now it looks like it’s the turn of Mads Mikkelsen to pick a gun or twenty and go on a murderous rampage of revenge.

The story isn’t anything new.  He’s a hitman who gets doublecrossed by is own side and now a team of hitmen is hunting our hitman.  Apparently, it’s based on a Dark Horse comic and I haven’t read that, so I can’t say how closely it sticks to the source material, but it certainly does its best to make itself LOOK like a comic book.  Seriously, I don’t know exactly how they’ve done it, but it must have something to do with exposing certain colours and using filter-trickery.  Anyway, the film is soooo colourful.  The director deliberately highlights plenty of primary colours to make it look like a ‘living comic book.’ Pretty cool really!

And, just like so many comic books, it’s totally over the top.  You really will have to suspend your disbelief and appreciate that nothing is really going to be particularly ‘realistic’ here.  The blood is over the top, the character design is over the top and the gore is very over the top.  In fact, it might be worth noting that there’s a few scenes of quite graphic torture and you may need a strong stomach to get through them!

Mikkelsen has to protect the compulsory damsel in distress, played by a (practically unrecognisable!) Vanessa Hudgens (in fact, I didn’t even know it was her until I saw her name in the end credits!).  While the head villain is played by British comedy actor Matt Lucas, who’s clearly enjoying himself as a ‘Little Britain’ style villain.

There’s plenty of great (and, as I’ve said, over the top) action and my favourite scene was the one with the ‘green lasers.’ You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean, but it reminded me of the ‘best’ scene from Arnie’s ‘Eraser’ film.  There’s a team of cool badguy assassins who are on Mikkelsen’s case and I would have liked to see more of them really.

It is quite a long film and maybe it could have been edited down here and there, plus there are about two scenes where I really did have to suspend my disbelief a little too much to get through it (both involved scores of totally incompetent henchmen being totally unable to hit Mikkelsen even when they have many clear shots on him).  However, those are just minor gripes.  Overall, ‘Polar’ is a lot of fun and even makes me want to see what the comics are like.  Great fun, just sit back, put your brain ‘on hold’ and enjoy (especially if you’re a fan of other similar movies like ‘Shoot ‘em Up’ and the ‘Crank’ series).

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that