Polar (2019)

Polar arrived on Netflix in January 2019 with the quiet dignity of a film nobody had asked to be saved. Jonas Åkerlund directs Mads Mikkelsen as Duncan Vizla, an assassin approaching mandatory retirement at fifty, whose employer, the Damocles corporation, has decided that the most efficient way to honor his decades of service is to kill him and keep the eight million dollars. It is a premise with a certain grim administrative logic, and the film leans on it just enough to register as a complaint about corporate greed. Mr. Blut, the owner, is liquidating his own workforce for profit. The observation lands. Then the film returns to decapitations.

The cultural inventory here is thin and mostly incidental. The cast includes a few international and non-white performers, gathered for genre utility and nothing more, and the several women who occupy combat and antagonist roles (Vivian, Sindy, Hilde, Camille) serve as action fixtures instead of arguments. Race is never a subject. Neither is the climate, nor queerness, nor body image. Camille, the traumatized neighbor, carries psychological damage from violence, which the film treats as damage, not as a window into neurodiversity. There is no thesis about any of it. There is a body count.

One scene finds Duncan addressing a classroom about foreign countries and combat, and a viewer braced for sermonizing may flinch. It is setup. The film's ambitions are pulpy, its provocations juvenile, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond a tolerance for arterial spray. Critics were unkind, and an eighteen percent approval rating suggests they found the exercise tiresome. They were not wrong. But the film is not preachy, not instructive, and not interested in improving anyone. It wants to be a revenge thriller. On that modest front it is sincere.