If I had a scale of movie insanity where Brief Encounter is a 1 and Hausu is a 10, Headhunters would be about an 8. The theft goes according to plan except for two important problems: first, Roger finds his wife’s cell phone among a tangle of sheets at Clas’s apartment and second, Clas is now trying to kill them. The Rubens will be moved to a museum in a few days so Roger and his sidekick act quickly to nab it.
When the client retorts that he owns an even more valuable piece, all Roger has to do is ask a few follow-up questions about the client’s personal life to find out if anyone’s likely to be at his home during the day.Īt a gallery opening, Roger’s wife introduces him to Clas (Coster-Waldau), who owns a priceless Rubens and looks like the perfect new patsy. There’s a humorous sequence at the beginning in which Roger brags about the expensive piece of art on the wall behind him and challenges the worth of his client’s art collection. It begins as an art-heist movie: Roger (Aksel Hennie) uses his position as a headhunter for a large corporation to scout his potential targets: wealthy executives with expensive art lying around. These include the director, Morten Tyldum, who also helmed last year’s The Imitation Game, and costar Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, better known as Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones. And a blood sport.Headhunters (2012) has been on my radar for a while now, partly because it’s a slick, stylish foreign thriller and that’s kind of my jam, and partly because it involves a few people who went on to achieve much greater notoriety. As Clas, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau brings the presence he exhibits in tv's Game of Thrones.Ī character says in Headhunters, "It's all a game." Screenwriters Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg effectively adapt the Nesbo novel.Īksel Hennie, as Roger, bears a strong likeness to a young Oskar Werner. Is the Yellow Bird - Road Runner?ĭirector Morten Tyldum creates crude power and suspense. Headhunters also is a film produced by Yellow Bird from a novel by Jo Nesbo. Yellow Bird is a Swedish production company which produced the Kurt Wallander films and the trilogy of Stieg Larsson's Millennium films. Like a Hitch protagonist, he's on the run. I think I saw an Acme safe fall near him. He is pummeled, stabbed, clobbered, and submerged in various liquids and muck. Clas was a member of a Dutch Special Forces Tracking Unit, and he is relentless. Roger finds out that Clas possesses a valuable Rubens' painting, and proceeds to steal it.Īt that point Roger discovers he has acquired a skilled adversary. But Roger has a hard time keeping up with expenses.Ī big score seems on the horizon when Roger meets Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) at a party celebrating the opening of Diana's art gallery. He replaces paintings with forgeries while he gets away with the pilfered art. He obtains information from interviews with candidates, and then robs them. To try to afford the lifestyle, Roger also is an art thief. Roger has a beautiful, statuesque blonde wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund), whom he is dedicated to keeping in luxury.
But he is a confident, corporate headhunter. Headhunters starts slowly as it focuses on Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) who, in narration, emphasizes that he is only 5 foot 6 inches tall. If that sounds like a strange, absurd concoction, it is. Coyote, with a generous dose of feces and blood. Headhunters ( Hodejegerne) is a roiling Norwegian mix of Hitchcock and Wile E.