CULT HERO OF THE MONTH
NORWEGIAN TOMMY WIRKOLA, of the Dead Snow Nazi-zombie movies, delivers a farcical, gruesome, Scandi-noir shaggy-dog tale with a Coen brothers feel in The Trip . Bickering couple Lars (Aksel Hennie) and Lisa (Noomi Rapace) — Swedes who’ve relocated to Norway and faltered in showbiz careers — retreat to a remote cabin where each plans to murder the other… only to have their crime scene invaded by three escaped convicts (Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck, André Eriksen) who make their bad day worse, prompting more and more extreme behaviour. It begins with icy, witty marital discord — Hennie and Rapace are hilariously vicious over Scrabble — then gets into broad black comedy, with bloody, transgressive material (other bodily discharges also feature) and several hilarious reversals of fortune. Funniest line (in context): “Over to you, Queer Dave.”
ANDY MITTON
Super-efficient, stylishly dressed, one-man-genocide assassins who are secret softies have been a thing in Asian cinema for decades, so it’s not really fair to tag Choi Jae-hoon’s The Killer as a riff on the John Wick or Taken films. It even borrows its export title from John Woo’s classic of the sub-genre. A seemingly dull businessman (Jang Hyuk) is stuck by his wife with the unwanted gig of looking after the teenage daughter (K-pop star Anne) of a friend she’s off on a girls-away trip with. The girl turns out to be a trouble magnet targeted by street punks, sex-traffickers, Russian Mafia, corrupt police and judiciary, and hordes of well-armed goons. And the businessman is a mercenary who now feels obligated to murder half of Seoul to prevent harm coming to a girl who is a) not grateful and b) astonishingly luckless. It’s thin drama, though Hyuk gets wry laughs as the hitman who wipes out whole gangs with the dour look of a sitcom husband dragooned into a thankless chore. Choi plus an army of stuntmen and choreographers stage a non-stop series of high-excitement fights.