Frosty 'The Snowman' a no go, man
<h3 class="briefHead">"The Snowman" - ★ ½</h3>
Frosty, this "Snowman."
And dull, inane, humorless, suspenseless, confusing and contrived.
About 52 minutes pass before anything truly exciting occurs in Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson's wannabe-thriller "The Snowman." But not even the gruesome sight of a woman being beheaded by a wire garrote increases the interest in this emotionally bankrupt production.
You have to feel sorry for composer Marco Beltrami, stuck with the unenviable job of goosing tensionless, lackadaisically paced scenes along by tapping ominous strings promising provocative payoffs that seldom pan out.
"The Snowman" is based on the seventh out of 11 Harry Hole crime novels from Norwegian author Jo Nesbo. Hole hails from the well-established canon of brilliant, yet flawed detectives who play by their own rules and give ulcers to bosses.
However, any suggestions that Nesbo's Oslo detective belongs in the same rarefied category as other literary sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot will be nullified by this tentative, slapped-together project pickled with red herrings, infested with fuzzy flashbacks and populated by perfunctory personalities.
Hole, played by an uncharacteristically placid Michael Fassbender, often sleeps in parks after pulling a fast bender.
An alcoholic, he doesn't do much detecting, yet his boss refers to him as "the Great Harry Hole," the comical implications of this title not to be explored in a family newspaper.
Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), a young, new recruit to the Oslo Crime Squad, calls Hole a "legend" and fawns over how his cases have been studied in school.
Hole and Katrine join forces after a mysterious serial killer beheads several young mothers, but only during snowfalls when the perpetrator can build creepy snowmen at the crime scenes to mock the authorities.
They try to find the common threads to the murders, embarking on a mystery marked by meandering incoherence and distracting, confusing flashbacks to nine years earlier when similar killings were investigated by Oslo cop Rafto (an embalmed Val Kilmer, brandishing a hairdresser's coiffure nightmare).
"The Snowman" provides a showcase for cinematographer Don Beebe's icy, pale-blue landscapes. Yet Alfredson displays little of the clarity and command he wielded so well in his translation of John LeCarre's dense "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy " or his vampire opus "Let the Right One In."
Unfortunately, savvy mystery fans should have no problem identifying the killer, as "The Snowman" telegraphs the guilty party through conspicuous goodness, a common pitfall of conventional whodunits.
Character actor J.K. Simmons attempts to flesh out his sleazy tycoon trying to lure the Winter Olympics to Oslo, but he presciently channels a Norwegian Harvey Weinstein instead.
Tobey Jones and Chloe Sevigny disappear quickly in curiously cursory roles.
Charlotte Gainsbourg seems bored as Hole's friendly ex-wife and mother of their struggling teenage son, Oleg (Michael Yates).
Yet, their relationship with Hole plays into the film's climax, not in a good way, when his confrontation with the killer resembles a group intervention more than a showdown.
<b>Starring:</b> Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, J.K. Simmons, Val Kilmer, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chloe Sevigny
<b>Directed by:</b> Tomas Alfredson
<b>Other:</b> A Universal Pictures release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 119 minutes