Netflix Original films are wildly hit or miss. For every Roma, Apostle, or Okja, there’s a Bird Box, a Mute, or a Cloverfield Paradox. It’s extremely hard to find a good original movie on the platform, but when you do find one, it is usually something really special. Their latest original project Polar, however, is not something special. In fact, it’s not really much of anything. Here we have that extremely rare case of a film that genuinely has nothing good about it. I really do mean that: there is nothing good about Polar at all. It’s bizarre.

Polar is based on the Dark Horse comic series of the same name, and is directed by Jonas Akerlund. It stars Mads Mikkelsen as an assassin on the brink of retirement, who faces execution when his boss refuses to pay out his pension on his 50^th birthday, sending a team of young assassins to hunt him down. If that sounds ridiculous it’s because it is, and that’s very much the vibe the film goes for – it just misses the mark. Massively.

Having said that, very few things about the film are bad, per se – it’s just that it is all not good. One of the bad things, however, is especially terrible. Polar feels woefully misogynistic in its portrayals of various female characters. To break it down; there are four prominent women over the course of the film: two assassins, one civilian, and one assassin handler. The two assassins are particularly overly-sexualised. The film’s opening scene has an uncomfortable focus on one of them as she exits a swimming pool in a bikini – the film’s male gaze wastes no time in getting started. This happens time and again; the camera seems to enjoy focusing on her body in various situations, including two bizarrely long and uncomfortably graphic sex scenes that add nothing to any aspect of the film. The character is given no personality other than her body; there is never an attempt to develop her (or any of the characters, really) in any way.

I imagine the conversation in the writers’ room went something like this: ‘So, we’ve got this group of assassins – do they need developing as characters so the audience can understand and engage with them?’ / ‘Nah, just give the hot woman some sex scenes that are so male-centred and weirdly graphic as to feel like something out of a porn film.’ / ‘Dave, you’re a genius.’ / ‘I know.’ I joke, of course, but only because I fail to understand the purpose of this. The other assassin is simply the girlfriend of the main villain, and the assassin handler adds … absolutely nothing. There’s also the matter of Vanessa Hudgens’ civilian character being reduced to a simple plot point. At one point in the film, she is captured by the assassins as a ransom to bring in Mads Mikkelsen’s character Duncan. She’s hooked on heroin (cue yet more uncomfortably long and lingering scenes), and held hostage until Duncan can rescue her. Given the amount of times we see this, you might expect that it will have some impact on her character, right? Wrong. Almost as soon as the heroin addiction is introduced, it is forgotten about and never mentioned again. I find myself repeatedly coming back to this word, but only because I can find no explanation for so many aspects of Polar: it’s baffling.

I should also state that it is a brutal watch – but not in a good way. Hyper-stylised ultra violence, when done right, can elevate a simple action film into art. Look at The Raid, the first Kingsman film, or the John Wick movies. Hell, even the brutality of the original Robocop works in its context. Here, however, it doesn’t. It is over-stylised to the point of silly, and never seems to fit with the tone the film is trying to go for. Not only that, it fails on a level of basic film making: there is motion blur visible in one action sequence. Actual motion blur. In a feature film. It seems unheard of: how is it possible to not have selected the correct shutter speed on a camera before filming? It is, frankly, incomprehensible. There is also an especially grim torture sequence that feels so unnecessarily prolonged and sadistic that, if we weren’t already completely unengaged, is sure to make us lose interest. For a torture scene to work, we need to be invested in the character being tortured (A Clockwork Orange, for example, or Casino Royale – one of Mikkelsen’s better roles). In Polar, there is no investment to be had.

This lack of investment is down to two things: one is the poor/non-existent character development; the other is the mostly one-note acting. Mads Mikkelsen seems remarkably unengaged throughout the entirety of the proceedings, only injecting emotion into his character during the aforementioned torture scene, and even that only amounts to some screaming. The only attempts at developing Duncan come in the form of flashbacks that haunt his dreams, but these never seem to have any bearing on the plot or his character, until a reveal five minutes before the film ends. Matt Lucas plays the villain – an interesting choice, to say the least. Lucas is a good comedic actor, but there’s no real gravitas to his performance here.

His character never feels like any kind of threat, even when he’s torturing Duncan in variously creative ways. Vanessa Hudgens comes across as wooden as ever. Even in her supposedly emotional scenes, her voice feels so blank that the dialogue does nothing to engage us with the character. The same goes for the band of assassins tasked with taking Duncan down; not one of them is developed. Despite their Suicide Squad-esque introductions, they are of so little consequence in the grand scheme of things. One of them is genuinely forgotten about by the end of the film. The others are all dealt with, but one just vanishes without so much as a final line or a send-off. It is, again, baffling.

That’s the word I would use to describe Polar as a whole. Whether it’s the lack of any attempt at character development, the lack of a clear tone, the errors in basic camerawork, the extremely poor attitude towards women, the absence of a good villain or the inadequacy of its action scenes, as a whole, Polar is not just baffling – it’s bafflingly bad.

Verdict:

There isn’t a single good thing to be said about Polar: a stupid, over-stylised John Wick wannabe that seems to forget to add anything of substance. There is nothing good about it, and you won’t be forgiven for scrolling straight past it. Definitely one that deserves to be left out in the cold.

Rating:

1/10