The film doesn't merit chinstroking: it's stuffed with Troma-style riffs around schlock, gore and human effluvia, bookended by Shallow Grave-like sections full of cynical machinations. The parts barely relate, never mind work together.
Headhunters(Hodejegerne)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Norway, Sweden, Denmark · 2011
Rated R · 1h 40m
Director Morten Tyldum
Starring Aksel Hennie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Synnøve Macody Lund, Julie R. Ølgaard
Genre Crime, Thriller
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An accomplished headhunter who also dabbles in art theft in order to fund his lavish lifestyle learns that one of his contacts has a valuable painting. Not understanding the deadly world of trouble he's about to enter, he resolves to steal it, and will soon regret it.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled-as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
A transgenre thriller that glides effortlessly from crisp social commentary through off-kilter comedy to paranoid terror, it's on my short list of the most enjoyable movies in recent memory.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Twisty enough to please many arthouse patrons, though some will be rolling their eyes by the end.
Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.
A slick thriller which takes place in a moral vacuum. It's fascinating rather than exciting, but makes for chilly thrills with two strong, charismatic lead performances, a great deal of style and amusingly repulsive, ruthless twists.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Plenty of twisty scripting makes the queasy damage seem conceptually neat and tidy, as if that's a good idea, but what we need here is a little more meat.
Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.
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