If “Polar” were a teenager, it might be content to chug Mountain Dew while playing first-person shooter games and trolling innocents online. Unfortunately, “Polar” is a movie, and if it has any redeeming qualities, it chooses to keep them a secret.
A particularly toxic brew of glibness and graphic violence, this Netflix throwaway, directed by music video maestro Jonas Akerlund, stars the usually trustworthy Mads Mikkelsen as a notorious hit man, the Black Kaiser, who decides he is ready to retire and ruminate on his sins. His boss (a preening Matt Lucas) has other ideas. He sends a team of hot, hip young assassins to take down the Kaiser in his wintry Montana hideout (and to torture as many people as they can along the way).
“Polar” actually contains one interesting idea: The Kaiser is a wanted man not because of anything he did but because his employer wants to seize his lucrative pension. Yes, the assassination corporation for which the Kaiser works has a pension plan. If it weren’t so busy slathering sadism, garish color schemes and played-out rapid-fire editing on the screen, “Polar” might make for a decent satire of corporate America.
Based on a web comic apparently popular enough to become a Netflix movie, “Polar” pales in comparison to other assassin-in-midlife-crisis movies like “Grosse Pointe Blank” (with John Cusack) and “Panic” (William H. Macy). Like both of those films, “Polar” throws a noble young woman into the mix: A grunged-out Vanessa Hudgens plays the vehicle for the Kaiser’s potential salvation. She is the centerpiece of an adequate final-act twist, but by then the damage has been done and overdone.
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‘Polar’
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.