neurotically eccentric

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Roger is a charming scoundrel and Norway’s most accomplished headhunter. He lives a life of luxury well beyond his means and chooses to subsidize his expensive lifestyle through stealing highly prized art. When his beautiful wife, an art gallery owner, introduces him to a former mercenary in possession of an extremely valuable painting, he decides to risk it all in order to obtain it, and in doing so, he discovers something that makes him a hunted man himself.

IS IT A GOOD MOVIE?

Recently I’ve found that if I want to watch a movie with even an inkling of an original idea, I need to watch a foreign film. A good chunk of the movies and TV shows with any fresh ideas have come from some place other than North America. That’s not to say that there aren’t good movies made here, but as far as originality goes, the rest of the world seemingly has us beat. However, I don’t want to get into a tyrade about originality in Hollywood and would rather just tell you about the Norwegian film HEADHUNTERS.

When I was looking up the names of the actors who starred in this film, no names were immediately recognizable to me. As it turns out, one of the actors was entirely recognizable. I’m not sure how I never knew his name outside of Game of Thrones, but Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) co-stars in HEADHUNTERS as former mercenary, Clas Greve. So that was a bonus.

I thought that HEADHUNTERS would be your basic heist movie gone wrong and that the majority of the movie would revolve around a stolen art piece, a police chase, an outside contractor hired to recover said piece. I couldn’t have been more wrong. HEADHUNTERS evolves from the stereotypes of heist movies and comes together to be a clever, original and well-written/directed film executed with a pitch-perfect cast. It goes from a slow build-up to psychological thriller in the blink of an eye as you try to keep up with what’s going on. Additionally, the film has some unexpected moments that made me pretty squeamish.

THE EXTRAS

Behind the Scenes of Headhunters: The director, producers, cinematographers and cast talk about the story and their experiences working on HEADHUNTERS.

The only other feature that this film has is the Theatrical Trailer for HEADHUNTERS.

FINAL DIAGNOSIS

HEADHUNTERS wasn’t exactly what I expected and that worked out just fine. I thoroughly enjoyed everything about the film from the writing, the pacing, the acting and more. The special features in the film aren’t extraordinary, but the Behind the Scenes bonus that they do include is pretty in-depth and worth checking out if you enjoy that sort of thing and you enjoyed the film itself. HEADHUNTERS is definitely worth checking out at least once.

(Source: joblo.com)