Norwegian thriller 'Headhunters': A Nordic, black-comic `Pulp Fiction'

A kind of Nordic "Pulp Fiction" -- with more twists and turns than Saw Mill Run Boulevard -- is on hand in "Headhunters," the new black-comic crime thriller from Norwegian director Morten Tyldum.

We must climb every mountain and fjord every stream of a complex plot involving Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), the most infamous corporate recruiter in Norway. A smooth-talking, supremely self-confident scoundrel, Roger prides himself on "never having given a client any advice that he hasn't followed" -- or hunted a head he didn't land.

That same approach has served him equally well with landing women, including his beautiful trophy wife, Diana (Synnove Macody Lund), a posh art-gallery owner, and his hot mistress, Lotte (Julie R. Olgaard), on the side. Oh, there's a minor problem or two: Diana wants a baby and Roger doesn't. And he's pathologically insecure about his diminutive 5-foot-6-inch height. But he compensates for all such deficiencies with an excess of the two things that really matter: swagger and money.

Trouble is, Roger's lifestyle has become so extravagant that even his huge headhunter salary is insufficient to cover it, and it must be subsidized by his avocation -- as an accomplished art thief. He and his gun-and-girl-crazed accomplice Ove (Eivind Sander) have a foolproof system of stealthily stealing the priceless original paintings and replacing them with expert forgeries that go undetected until long after the heist.

These private and professional issues intersect at a gallery show, when Diana introduces him to suave, hunky Clas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a GPS-nanotechnology wizard, whose head Roger instantly hunts for a corporate client. But Clas turns him down. He has even more swaggering self-confidence than Roger -- and, as Diana clearly notices, he's oh-so-much taller and sexier!

And more to the economic than the erotic point: Clas' grandmother has a priceless Rubens, lost and/or stolen during WWII.

Director Tyldum's screenplay is based on the 2008 best-seller by Oslo author Jo Nesbo, whose internationally acclaimed crime novels have expanded the form and been translated into 35 languages and published in 140 countries. This one, by all accounts, is wilder and more playfully lunatic than Mr. Nesbo's previous entries, full of outrageous set pieces. The most outrageous, by far, is a chase scene in which Roger ends up in an outhouse, with no place to hide but -- you guessed it -- down below. Suffice to say, he's in deep doo-doo...while we, the audience, are in deep disgust, or amusement, depending on your scatlogical sensibilities.

Runner-up in the over-the-top department would be the scene in which Clas' vicious attack dog ends up impaled on the fork of a harvesting tractor. I tell you this not as a spoiler but as a dispassionate consumer caveat: If the credits contain a "No animals were harmed in the making of this film" notice, I missed it in the Norwegian fine print.

(But the dog had it coming to him.)

Other less objectionable devices abound, including Roger calling Diana from Clas' hideaway -- and hearing her cell phone ring there, on the premises. Or discovering Ove dead in his own car, but learning otherwise during disposal of the body. The script's sneaky goal is the slow evolution of our sympathies to Roger, and the mounting importance of his hair as a compensation for shortness -- and as a darkly droll way out of his predicament.

Mr. Hennie as Roger is fine, resembling a short Norwegian Christopher Walken. Mr. Coster-Waldau (of the "New Amsterdam" and "Game of Thrones" TV series, plus "Black Hawk Down") plays a perfectly cool villain, while lanky Ms. Lund as Diana stays properly enigmatic to the end. Mr. Sander is especially enjoyable as Roger's crazy sidekick Ove, advising him to keep a gun in every room.

All in all, the story is perhaps too clever and well-constructed by half, requiring more suspension of disbelief than a Rick Santorum campaign speech: It's Elmore Leonard and John LeCarre meeting Bret Easton Ellis and the Coen Brothers in a grab bag of thriller tricks and double-triple crosses, liberally dipped in blood 'n' guts.

Along the way, the art heist and headhunting business get largely lost in the shuffle, in favor of ridiculing the nouveau riche and a dumb domestic denouement. But it's still a gripping, bizarre black comedy, well made and acted -- though the Tarantino-esque violence seems less funny than it might have, in the wake of normally nonviolent Norway's recent, horrific mass shooting.

Fade out, on Munch's (much-stolen) "The Scream."