Hodejegerne (Headhunters)

Time to brush up on my Norwegian. Again.

'Headhunters' or to give it its original title - ‘Hodejegerne’ is ostensibly a thriller based on a Jo Nesbø book produced by those Yellow Bird folk, the Dragon Tattoo people. Usually the book is a lot better than the film of the book. All I can say is; it must be some book.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) works as a corporate headhunter but his job clearly doesn’t pay well enough to keep his woman (Synnøve Macody Lund) in the style she's become accustomed to. For which he has our sympathy.

He’s worried she’ll leave him because he's short with an inferiority complex whereas she's tall, blonde and beautiful. Perhaps he has a point. So to make her ends meet, he has a side job as an art thief.

Also on the side, he has mistress Lotte (Julie Ølgaard), which doesn’t really make sense. Why resort to crime to keep the woman of your dreams and then have a mistress... but then little is simple in Headhunters.

He uses his job to ascertain whether potential job recruits own any decent works of art, whether they live alone, have a dog etc... then he burgles them, replacing their paintings with fakes. He is aided and abetted by Ove (Eivind Sander), a security expert with a taste for Russian prostitutes.

When Roger is introduced to Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a man who has allegedly an original Rubens hanging in his grandmother’s apartment, suddenly he has the ‘big one’, the one that will finance his trophy wife for good but this time he steals from the wrong guy. Greve turns out to be a psychopath, things get rapidly out of control from there on in and Roger finds out what it is to be headhunted himself.

He ends up fearing for his life but at first, he doesn't really know why. As the bodies mount up, he doesn't know whom he can trust and whom he can't. Nor can we.

The film is clever in that you start by seeing Roger one way but pretty soon your perception of him changes. Roger goes through a lot, a hell of a lot and ends up doing things he wouldn't ordinarily dream of doing, just to stay alive.

The film is full of surprises and at times leads us on a right merry dance. You think one thing but then you think something else. You start rooting for one guy and then end up rooting for another. It’s all done at great pace and with a rather dark, macabre sense of humour bubbling along just under the surface, including a rather shameless rehash of a scene from Slumdog Millionaire.

It would be impossible to spoil much more of the plot for you because there's so much of it and it gets increasingly more complex as the film goes on but it always remains plausible, just about. Just don’t dare blink.

See this before a Hollywood remake appears. Apparently Mark Wahlberg already has his hands on the script. Why bother? There’s no way on earth Hollywood could better this.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen

My partner has read the book of and therefore desperately wants to see ‘Salmon Fishing In The Yemen’, I tag along, although I’m sure it’s just a RomCom in an ill-fitting disguise.

Ewan McGregor is Fred Jones, speaking for once in his native Scottish. Fred is a fisheries expert working for the government or the Environment Agency or something like that. Fred is told of an Arab sheikh who has more money than sense and wants to do that thing in the title. So I can’t complain the plot isn’t straightforward.

Once Fred has picked himself up off the floor from laughing at the prospect of taking salmon from cold rainy Scotland to the deserts of Yemen, he is told it is going to happen anyway. The government requires a feel good story to distract the gullible public from the bloodshed that is occurring in Afghanistan. Fred is sent off pronto to see the sheik’s representative, the impressively named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). Ah ha, at this point flashing lights and sirens go off as the ill-fitting disguise is cast aside revealing the irresistible shag interest.

Fred is so dull though, very well acted dull by McGregor as it happens, you'd think he was into fishing, oh he is. Whereas Ms Something-Somewhat can out of nowhere summon up an impressive knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. Why is she interested? Who knows, ask the fish.

So we have two ill matched people, who are thrust together by circumstance. They will naturally start off at odds but will gradually become fond of each other, then they’ll overcome some last minute crisis before living happily ever after amongst the fish. So, the usual then.

There’s a slight complication that Fred is married and Harriet has a soldier boyfriend (Tom Mison) of a mere three weeks. These though are circumstances that can easily be circumnavigated. Rest assured it's written large across the screen that Fred is not happily married and that Harriet's squeeze is going to die in action in Afghanistan.

Although he doesn't actually die, in a slight plot twist, he is the one person who not only survives an otherwise fatally unsuccessful military operation but is totally unscathed by it. The government whisk him out to Yemen immediately in a blatant PR stunt that no one seems to see through.

Yemen is but the backdrop, the back story of why the Yemenese people so want to sabotage this project is untold. Yet, despite the employment of top Chinese engineers from the Yangtze River dam, sabotage it they do.

That the film has its humorous moments is down to the deadpanning of McGregor but also to the excellent role of Kristin Scott Thomas who plays the Prime Minister’s pushy press officer, who chats with her boss on Instant Messenger. She gets practically all the best lines.

Apparently in the book practically everyone ends up dead or miserable, whereas this has a more predictable upbeat ending. Neither seems an ideal conclusion.

It’s the most undemanding film I’ve seen in some time but it’s harmless enough. A bit like fishing really.