Film / Polar

Polar is a film adaptation of the action noir comics series of the same name. It is directed by Jonas Åkerlund and stars Mads Mikkelsen, Vanessa Hudgens, Katheryn Winnick and Matt Lucas.

Duncan Vizla (Mikkelsen) was the world's most deadly assassin, being known in the trade as the Black Kaiser, until he retired to a quiet life in the countryside. But just as he is settling into retirement and getting acquainted with a young attractive neighbor (Hudgens), his former employer decides to mark him as a liability. Against his will Vizla finds himself back in the game, going head to head with an army of younger, faster, more ruthless killers who will stop at nothing to kill him.

It premiered on Netflix on January 25, 2019 and the trailer can be seen here.

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Polar contains examples of:

• Assassin Outclassin': Basically sums up the fight between Vizla and the A-Team. After Facundo fails to kill him on the first shot and accidentally shoots Sindy instead, Vizla kills her first before going after Facundo. Then, after he kills Karl, Vizla uses Facundo's sniper rifle to kill the rest of the A-Team inside his cabin. The only reason Alexei survived was because he wasn't there, as he'd left earlier to implement their Plan B.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: In this case not because You Know Too Much or You Can Never Leave, but simply out of fraud.
• Asshole Victim: While the A-Team is going through each of Duncan's destinations, one of the tenants tries to rape Sindy. That earns him a bullet to the head.
• Ass Shove: Part of Duncan's medical checkup includes a prostate exam.
• The Atoner: Duncan is shown to regularly donate large portions of his wealth to a mysterious charity. As it turns out, the charity was for Camille, whose family was murdered by Duncan during one of his hits. When she finally confronts him over this in the end, he is fully willing to let her kill him for this.
• Attempted Rape: Sindy functions as the Honey Trap of the A-Team, but on one occasion her target is a violent sexual abuser who proceeds to beat her before realizing that he was Mugging the Monster when the rest of her colleagues intervene. This incident actually seems to get to her.
• Badass Longcoat: Vizla is Exposed to the Elements thanks to his Interrupted Intimacy, so he strips the coat from Facundo and wears it himself.
• Big Fancy House:
  • Michael Green retired to a large mansion in the mountains of Chile. Vivian dismissively refers to it as a McMansion.
  • Blut has an inner city mansion that he uses as headquarters and torture chamber.
• Black Humor: The movie contains a whole lot of it. Such as Vizla buying a dog, then accidentally shooting it after a PTSD nightmare.
• Blatant Lies: Duncan claims to have quit smoking and drinking, but in private he can be seen indulging in both vices.
• Book Ends: The movie begins with the camera moving over a forest towards Michael Green's retirement house. The movie ends with the camera moving over the forest away from Vizlas's retirement cabin.
• Bullying a Dragon: Deliberately picking a fight with the Black Kaiser is not a good idea.
• Catchphrase: Vivian always starts her phone calls with a laconic "Speak".
• Chekhov's Gun: Vizla has a piece of metal lodged in his left side from a previous wound, which he declines to get surgically removed when he's seeing a doctor. This ends up allowing him to escape from Mr. Blut's torture when Blut's knife strikes the metal and breaks off inside Vizla's body, allowing him to remove it and pick the lock on his restraints with it.
• Chick Magnet: Subverted at every instance. Despite being middle-aged, Duncan Vizla is a ruggedly good-looking and virile badass and has several female acquaintances throughout the film. However, the first woman is simply a prostitute he frequents in Minsk, who later rejects him completely for putting her life in danger. The second is Sindy, who has wild sex with Vizla to take him off his guard to be assassinated, and is dispassionately killed by him for it; it's implied that he only gave into her advances to take her and her team off guard. He and Vivian are implied to have a history, but we only see their relationship through a strictly mercenary perspective and Vizla goes out of his way to distance himself from her. Near the end of the film, he visits Jasmine, an old flame of his. But only as a last resort when he needs shelter and weapons; Jasmine laments that he isn't there for her, but he doesn't acknowledge her attraction. He cares for and fights to save Camille, the woman he is closest to in the film, but there is nothing romantic or sexual about their relationship.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The A-Team uses this on their hunt for Vizla and later it's used on Vizla himself after he gets captured.
• Cold Sniper: Facundo. He ends up being dispatched by Duncan while in the middle of sniping, who proceeds to show the rest of the A-Team that he is an even colder sniper.
• Complexity Addiction: The A-Team’s Fatal Flaw. Their idea to use Sindy as a Honey Trap sounds fine on paper (have the target killed while she’s distracting them with sex), except the targets (with the exception of Vizla) don’t know they’re being hunted, and Sindy is laughably incompetent at anything other than being a distraction, meaning the rest of the team has to move in anyway to keep her from getting killed if Facundo misses… which he does in the intro.
• Contract on the Hitman: Vizla is a master assassin, and his former employer puts a price on his head. As a matter of fact Mr. Blut intends to have all the retired assassins killed so he can appropriate their retirement funds.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Mr. Blut is an example of how nasty things can get when the company the executive runs is a Murder, Inc.. The whole plot boils down to misappropriation of pension funds to make the company more attractive for a buyout.
• Corruption of a Minor: Camille convinces Vizla to give a talk at the local elementary school about his experiences traveling the world in the "funeral business". Vizla turns it into a thinly disguised show and tell about assassinations.
• Curbstomp Battle: Despite Mr. Blut proclaiming that he's "gonna fuck him up", this is how the final confrontation between him and Duncan goes. Faced by an axe-wielding Duncan, Blut raises his sword and pistol in a pathetic Bring It stance. Not five seconds later, Blut's decapitated head is chucked through a window and down into the street.
• Cutting Corners: An extreme example: Blut decides it's best to save himself some cash and increase the apparent profit of Damocles so the buy-out will have a better chance of happening by not paying his employees that are about to retire — and considering that they are assassins, he decides it's best to kill them all. That's not only just greedy, that's flat-out sociopathic.
• Deadly Euphemism: When Camille asks Vizla what he used to do before retirement, he says he was in the "funeral business". He then gives a cover story that he travels the world to arrange the funerals of Americans who have died in other countries.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Blut makes Vizla's torture last for days by slicing and cutting small amounts of flesh off him with knives and pincers.
• Death Seeker: Implied with Vizla. He's willing to give himself up in exchange for Camille (Blut stupidly refuses to take the offer, even though Camille is worthless to him) and leaves a money trail that even a non-professional like Camille can trace—the A-Team uses this to track him down themselves.
• Deliberately Jumping the Gun: Blut orders Vizla to kill the Mexican hitman who supposedly killed the other retired Damocles assassins. Instead of waiting for his advance payment, Vizla goes straight to Belarus and kills the man, finding a target dossier of himself in the man's hotel room. He then gets the down payment from Vivian and then reveals that he's killed the target just moments ago. Cue Oh, Crap! from Vivian.
• Dented Iron: We are first introduced to Vizla in the doctor's office as he examines him, we see several scars and gunshot wounds and the doctor comments that he should get around to removing the metal still in him. Vizla has definitely lost some of his old speed and strength but goes about his business in a precise, careful manner that makes him no less dangerous for it.
• Dinner and a Show: Blut is eating a fancy dinner while watching on several monitors the view from the cameras of the men sent to kill Vizla. What happens next makes him lose his appetite.
• Elite Mooks: Despite being presented as master assassins and the main threat in the movie, this is basically what the A-Team turns out to be. Vizla dispatches all of them in short order, although they prove a greater challenge than the indistinct black-clad mooks he faces the rest of the film.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Vizla beds multiple women throughout the film, Sindy is a Honey Trap, Alexei has sex with an informant of the A-Team, Vivian frequents strippers and has apparently enjoyed the affections of several male assassins. This trope is in play a lot.
• Evil Redhead: Alexei.
• Eye Scream: Duncan gets his eye stabbed out by Mr. Blut during his third day of torture.
• Fat Bastard: Mr. Blut, a truly striking example.
• Femme Fatale: Vivian. Hilde and Sindy also count.
• Foreshadowing
  • Camille is a nervous wreck in almost every scene she is in, specially while talking to Vizla. This is because she has PTSD about the massacre of her entire family and being in the presence of the man who killed them only makes it worse.
  • Vizla religiously donates to a particular charity. This is the blood money he pays to finance Camille's education.
• Greed: Mr. Blut's main motivation for going after Vizla. He intends to kill all the retired Damocles employees so that the 29 million dollars in their pension funds revert back to the company, thus making it more attractive to its prospective buyers.
• The Handler: Vivian is the one who hands over the assignments to Damocles' assassins and monitors their progress on the field. Curiously, she is also an active operative, as Vizla questions why she just doesn't do the Belarus job herself and we see her carrying out a hit while talking on the phone.
• Hidden Wire: Sindy has a transmitter hidden in her jewelry, so the A-Team can let her know when they're ready to move in. After being accidentally shot, she continues to relay where Vizla is hiding in the room until he gets tired of dodging bullets and kills her.
• Honey Trap: Sindy's main role in the A-Team is to seduce the targets and get them to drop their guard. The rest of the team usually makes their move while she is giving the target oral sex.
• Hookers and Blow:
  • Michael Green decided to spend his retirement doing lines of coke and having sex with prostitutes whose names he can't even remember.
  • Likewise the Mexican hitman in Belarus; this means his guard is down when Vizla turns up early.
• Identical Grandson: A portrait of Mr. Blut's father shows him to look identical to his son, right down to the large birthmarks on his face.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: While Duncan is sleeping in the chair, he has a nightmare and ends up killing his new dog.
• It's Personal: After Vizla kills Blut's girlfriend Hilde and almost all of her team Blut claims that the situation has turned personal... much to Vivian's astonishment.
  Vivian: Stealing his pension, trying to kill him, twice, and kidnapping his cute little neighbor... that is personal.
• It's What I Do: This is pretty much Vivian's response when Vizla asks why she's trying to kill him. Indeed there seems no other reason for the other killers to go along with Blut's scheme, given the precedent he's setting.
• Karma Houdini: Porter gets no comeuppance for betraying Vizla and serving him up to Blut.
• Kevlard: One of Duncan's tenants is so fat he survives being shot five times in the chest and requires the A-Team emptying on him.
• Kinda Busy Here: A Running Gag involves Vivian being busy with her own activities when someone rings her, from attending a funeral to partying at a strip club. On one occasion she appears to be playing squash, only for a Reveal Shot to show she's just assassinated her squash partner.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Blut's remaining guards quit when they see Duncan approaching Blut's palace, refusing to invoke We Have Reserves.
• Kukris Are Kool: Vizla takes a kukri to a show and tell at an elementary school and the kids are all fascinated by it. He even gives them a lesson on how to use it.
• Lady Swearsalot: Vivian swears in almost every sentence.
• Last Chance to Quit: During the confrontation at the warehouse, Vizla offers Vivian a last chance to walk away, for the sake of their past friendship. Vivian ignores it and is gunned down by the remote-controlled machine guns on the upper level. Curiously enough, even though the offer was refused, Vizla still seems to have honored it, as he doesn't finish off the still-alive Vivian and just moves on to go after Blut.
• Made of Iron:
  • Vizla is absurdly tough, to the point that after three days of torture he is still capable of fighting his way out of a building slaughtering dozens of guards.
  • One of Vizla's tenants survives getting shot 5 times and requires the A-Team emptying their guns on him to make sure he is dead.
• Male Gaze: Lots of this on Cindy from her introductory Slow Motion Sexy Surfacing Shot; justified as her job is to ensure the target is Distracted by the Sexy. Even when she has to wear more clothes Oop North, she makes sure the first view Vizla has of her is her bending over her car's engine wearing tight leather pants.
• Mood Whiplash: The final scene takes the movie from over-the-top action to high drama.
• Mook Horror Show: Duncan has three. By the time a fourth appears imminent, the remaining mooks are smart enough to cut and run.
• Moral Myopia: Blut is utterly incensed when Vizla kills his girlfriend Hilde, and declares it an unforgivable offense that makes things personal. Vivian immediately points out how ridiculously hypocritical this is considering Hilde was trying to kill Vizla at the time and in general Vizla is only defending himself from all the things Blut is trying to do to him.
• More Dakka: The confrontation in the warehouse comes down to escalating displays of this trope. Vivian brings two dozen mooks armed with automatic rifles to take down Vizla, while the Black Kaiser has set up remote-controlled machine guns on the upper level of the warehouse.
• Ms. Fanservice: Sindy in spades. Par for the course in her role as the A-Team's Honey Trap.
• Murder, Inc.: Damocles Industries is a company that hires out assassins. They even have pension funds for their employees with matching contributions from the company. The company's owner wanting to turn those funds from liabilities to income in the accounting books is what drives the plot.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Vizla has recurring bad dreams about a hit gone wrong. It turns out that he accidentally massacred a family based on false information from the people who hired him. When he tore open the car door and realized his error, he spared the life of a young girl and made sure to provide for her over the years.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: Unlike the A-Team who Leave No Witnesses, Vizla only kills his target or people trying to kill him. He has recurring nightmares of the time he shot up a car with tinted windows and discovered the target's family was in there with him.
• No-Gear Level: The A-Team hit on Duncan is this since he's utterly naked from having sex with Sindy, then killing her when it turns out she's trying to kill him. The most he has on him is a gun, but that's all he needs to get to Facundo and take out all but Alexei.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Mr. Blut is completely useless in a fight, being utterly dependent on assassins and legions of mooks. Duncan dispatches him in one stroke.
• Odd Friendship: Duncan, a cold, anti-social, middle-aged assassin with Nerves of Steel, and Camille, a kind and innocent young nature photographer who is easily startled. Becomes even more pronounced at the end when it is revealed that he is the man who killed her family and the memory of this haunts both of their dreams. Despite that, they still remain together in the end.
• Off with His Head!: Mr. Blut's head goes flying out the window courtesy of Duncan.
• Omniglot: Vizla speaks eight languages.
• One Last Job: Subverted when Vizla only takes it under pressure, then carries out the hit two days early as Betrayal Insurance.
• One-Man Army: Vizla is just one man, but he is capable of cutting a bloody swath through legions of assassins and mooks.
• Only Sane Woman: Vivian is quick to point out what a monumentally stupid idea it is to antagonize the Black Kaiser. She also spends the whole movie advising Blut to simply cut his losses and pay Vizla his damn pension.
• Paid Harem: Subverted with Sindy who appears to be the standard Fanservice Extra lounging around in the villain's Big Fancy House, but is quickly revealed to be part of the hit team about to assassinate him.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: When Camille reveals at the end that she's the girl whose family Vizla accidentally murdered and the beneficiary of his "charity fund", he urges her to pull the trigger when she has him at gunpoint. She fires the gun in the air instead, leaving an uncertain future for both of them.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Even before they give any indications of wanting to kill him, Vizla takes a great effort to keep his employers at arm's length and make sure nobody knows where he lives.
  • After Vivian endlessly pesters him about taking One Last Job, he finally agrees to do it but only after he already killed the target thus spoiling Blut's plan to stage an ambush.
  • Vizla always swaps out his SIM card after using a phone and never stays on the line too long. The one time Vivian is able to coax him into a long conversation so they can do a Phone-Trace Race, she's actually being Lured into a Trap.
• Red Baron: Vizla's reputation is so epic that he is known in the assassin community as the "Black Kaiser".
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Vivian wears a red coat and black beret in the warehouse scene to contrast with her black-clad mooks in their black SUV's.
• Replacement Goldfish: Literally where, after he accidentally kills his new dog, he gets a bowl of goldfish.
• Retired Monster: Before his retirement, Vizla was the single most deadly assassin in the world.
• The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction: Justified; the first time Sindy is posing as a hooker, then when she has sex with Vizla she acts like she's bored and there's literally nothing else to do to pass the time.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The last remaining goons Blut has with him all make a run for it after Vizla butchers dozens of men and drives up to the mansion. One of them even tells him where Blut is on the way out. When Blut rings the man guarding Camille so he can use her as a hostage, the guard outright tells Blut that he's on his own. Vizla lets them go.
• Sequel Hook: The movie ends with Camille and Vizla deciding to track down the people who ordered the massacre of her family.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: The A-Team to Damocles' old assassins, when push comes to shove they are comically inept in comparison.
  • Sindy's only ability seems to be pretty and distracting.
  • Facundo only manages to hit targets when they're stationary and distracted by Sindy.
  • Alexei decides to drag along a drug addled girl he's having sex with in the hunt for, possibly, the most dangerous man in the world. Said girl then reveals his plan to Duncan
  • The rest of the team manages to get offed by Vizla, while he's naked and wielding an axe.
• Single Mom Stripper: The prostitute Vizla frequents in Belarus has a young son to support. When he pays her for spending two days with him in a hotel, which is actually a cover while he's on a job, she's incredibly pissed off for potentially putting both their lives in danger and demands that he break off all contact.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The A-Team. They are considered Blut’s best killers… except killing is all they’re (relatively) good at. They have a bad case of Complexity Addiction, are not nearly as good as they think they are (Facundo doesn’t score a kill shot on Michael in the opening scene despite ideal conditions, Alexei and Hilde shoot him up close, and he still doesn’t die until Hilde shoots him point-blank in the head) and they aren’t the least bit subtle, going in and roughing up the tenants in Vizla’s properties before killing them after the fact. When they go up against Vizla himself, a killer with decades of experience who is considered a Living Legend, he dispatches them to a man inside five minutes.
• Smoke Out: During the tunnel shootout Vizla shoots a powder extinguisher to obscure himself from the mooks firing at him. Shortly after he shoots a steam pipe to more lethal effect.
• Snow Means Death: Vizla has retired to the cold, snowy town of Triple Oak, Montana; which promptly becomes the site of a lot of killing.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: One of the A-Team's targets tries to escape by Destination Defenestration. Unfortunately, he doesn't have enough force and just bounces off. At the end of the scene when the team leaves, the window breaks.
• Suspicious Spending: Defied. Vizla is indicated to have earned millions of dollars as a hitman, but he lives in a quiet mountain cabin and keeps a low profile. This is because Vizla is Properly Paranoid; another hitman who did retire to spend his money on a luxurious Hookers and Blow lifestyle is easily tracked down and killed off.
• Take That!: The entire scene with Vizla accidentally shooting his new dog when coming out of a PTSD nightmare is a subtle jab against John Wick.
• Teach Me How To Fight: Subverted; Vizla buys Camille a pistol and tries to teach her how to use it. She's unable even to hold the weapon without suffering PTSD. Turns out she can hold the pistol just fine when she's pointing it at the man who killed her parents.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The A-Team’s standard operating procedure, as they make use of a sniper plus three heavily armed hitmen moving in at close range, all simultaneously and while the target is distracted by a Honey Trap. Justified as the people they are targeting are themselves professional killers with years of experience.
• To the Pain: Mr. Blut recounts the torturous death of William Wallace to achieve this effect with a captured Duncan. The torture he ends up inflicting, while excessively vicious, doesn't quite live up to it, though (partly because he's not able to actually finish the job, having earlier indicated that he intends to do various awful things to Vizla that we don't get to see).
• Too Dumb to Live: Blut, in spades. He decides to save a few million dollars by killing off his retired assassins, and tries to kill his most feared retired assassin... with a poorly thought out plan and a couple budget thugs that unsurprisingly get butchered by the highly prepared Vizla. Vivian calls him out on how stupid an idea this was.
• Tricked-Out Gloves: In the Abandoned Warehouse scene, Vizla uses gloves with Laser Sights on the fingers to aim the automated fifty calibre machine guns he uses to ambush Vivian's mooks.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: The repulsive Mr. Blut and the exotic Hilde are madly in love. Looks aside, the attraction might stem from the fact that they are equally depraved individuals.
• Uncertain Doom: After the shootout in the warehouse, Vivian is left seriously wounded, but alive. Vizla doesn't finish her off and just walks away. She is never mentioned again.
• Undignified Death: In the prologue, Michael Green gets shot by a sniper while receiving a blow job and immediately after taking Viagra. After he is shot several times more, his corpse is left displaying a prominent erection.
• Villain Opening Scene: The first couple of minutes follow the A-Team of Damocles assassinating a former hitman.
• We Have Reserves: Defied. When Vizla arrives for a final showdown with Blut, Blut's bodyguards quit en masse, directing him to Blut and quickly getting out his way. Blut flat out tells the A-Team they're replaceable if they fail.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The group negotiating to purchase Damocles from Blut is never mentioned again after their introductory scene.
  • Justified in this case: Their interest was conditional on Blut successfully turning a liability into an asset (by murdering all the retired assassins he owes pensions to). Since Blut fails to do that, we can assume the buyers simply walked away. And that's not mentioning the fact that Blut, his best assassins, and hordes of his mooks all end up dead, meaning there's not much of a company left to buy.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Evalina angrily calls out Vizla for using her and her 8-year-old son as part of his assassination plan in Minsk, rightly pointing out that they could've been killed.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: After his girlfriend is killed, Blut insists on capturing Vizla alive so he can be slowly tortured to death. In fairness this nearly works, but a single mistake is all it takes to doom him.
  • And again in the warehouse, if the mooks had just come out of their cars blasting while he was out in the open, rather than just standing there while Vivian talked/gloated to him, he would have never had a chance to set off his Laser guided machine guns.
  • When Sindy sets her Honey Trap, it seems like she had plenty of time to shoot him herself before her team mates arrive as his guard seemed to be down for a lot of that time. Perhaps she just likes the sex...
• Wig, Dress, Accent: Vivian wears a wildly different wig and outfit in almost every single scene that she is in.

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