At one point in the movie, the protagonist is naked but covered in a thick layer of human shit, desperately trying to outrace an ominous black SUV down a forest road, at night, driving an antique farm tractor on the front forks of which an enormous white dog has recently been impaled. Well, it's two days really, but the degree of shock, horror, and degradation he goes through is so hyperbolic that, if you have a healthy sense of pleasure at the misfortune of others, you will be chuckling heartily despite your better self. The machinery of the genre plays out nicely from there, with lots of predictable surprises, lots of genuinely surprising surprises, and the kinds of questions about who is or isn't lying to whom that lead to additional speculation after you've left the theater.īut the thriller logic of Headhunters is also an elaborate container for a kind of sustained joke in which a reasonably likable guy has a bad day that just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. The stakes go up dramatically when a candidate for a high-level executive position turns out to have a long-missing Rubens original, deep scars from his career in military special operations, and something fishy going on with the hero's wife. Our "hero," more or less, is Oslo's top corporate recruiter (half of the title's double meaning), but he spends so extravagantly to support his high-maintenance wife that he has to dabble in art theft on the side to make ends meet. I think that Headhunters is exactly as funny as it was supposed to be, deliberately comic behind its surface mask of an intricate criminal escapade.
As we left the theater after this cheerful, violent Norwegian crime thriller, I heard a woman behind me remark "I think that movie was funnier than it was supposed to be." I don't agree with her, though.
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