The Snowman (2017)

This has to be a record for the least amount of reasons I actually wanted to review a movie, and that's just down to the name of the main character: Michael Fassbender IS... Detective Harry Hole. That name is so insane that I had to see this shit to see if it was as goofy.

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

And it wasn't. Seriously. This is an insanely boring piece of shit with no point to it. If you wanted to stop reading now, you wouldn't be missing out on much – except for my razor-sharp trademarked wit, anyway. I guess the director has said the reason this was so botched up was because they didn't have time to shoot 10-15 percent of the script, and had to start unexpectedly early. And I get that. But at the same time, I'm just not that sure this would've been that much better anyway.

It starts off with a flashback of this kid trying to learn schoolwork and whenever he gets it wrong, his asshole stepfather (or whatever the character is supposed to be) smacks his mother in the face. Not sure that's part of the accepted curriculum. Then after finding out the stepfather is sleeping with someone else, the mother and the kid go on a drive when the mother gives up and tries to kill them both on thin ice! The kid escapes, but the mother dies – what a cheerful opening that also reveals so much about the movie we're about to see.

Then we're introduced to Detective Harry Hole, a complete lazy degenerate who somehow keeps his job even in spite of constantly drinking after work and falling asleep in snowy alleyways that should probably kill him. He's just a fucking loser, and Michael Fassbender's talents are wasted. Hell, he barely even has any fucking dialogue. There are scenes where he just walks up to people wordlessly staring at them, and we're just kind of supposed to dissect and analyze what that means even with zero real clues.

I guess she's his ex girlfriend and has a kid who isn't even his, but for some reason he's still involved. And there's a new guy in the mix who acts subtly snooty but isn't really a bad guy. Wow! Disconnected family drama! What a new, exciting thing!

Oh, okay, that was sarcasm. But you know what IS super fresh? A younger, motivated partner who joins the force and starts really trying to idealistically solve crimes that her jaded older partner thinks are impossible! Oh wait, shit, that's cliché hack garbage too. Fuck. Maybe this movie isn't so good.

The story is quite amazingly, infuriatingly directionless. It just seems to ramble on and not get to the point at all. I guess there's some scraps of a story when a woman goes missing and there's a mysterious snowman in the yard. But that should've been like, the first scene. Instead, it sort of just lazily drools through the film over the first half hour and there isn't much resolution or drive to solving it. There's a bunch of other fucking bullshit about Hole's ex-girlfriend's family, some camping trip, a hockey game, honestly, it's all just shit and we don't need to focus on it. The movie does enough time-wasting so I don't have to.

At least the young woman detective has pertinent theories about why the killer is doing stuff, saying the snow probably sets him off. That's fucking stupid because there's literally no evidence to support it – and the movie seems to agree with me, as it proves to be false anyway.

Oh, and got to love how it's set in Norway but every single character exclusively speaks perfect English in a British accent. You know, the usual lazy way to show a foreign country. Just have everyone be British! I mean why wouldn't I ever want to see a different culture or anything like that?

Eventually, after like 45 minutes of film – near half the runtime – we FINALLY get a real story starting to emerge, which is so asinine I'd throw the movie into a ravine if I hadn't rented it from Redbox. Some lady is reported missing, to which Harry Hole and his partner go and try to figure it out. But she's actually just fine, chopping off chicken heads in the dead of winter, like you do. Then they leave and before they even get very far in the car, they get ANOTHER call about the same lady, missing again! How inconsiderate to waste resources like that. Don't you know gas is expensive now?

I guess Harry Hole wanders around a bit, with Fassbender wearing a permanent expression of zombielike uncaring, and he finds a hole to look down in! Hey, Harry Hole is looking down a hole! Yeah, that's about all the humor I can mine from this dead, dried up well. But you do get to see a woman's severed head on top of a snowman! It's too bad that isn't as funny as it sounds. A better movie would've played it for campy laughs. But not The Snowman. This is mercifully free of any entertainment.

The movie sluggishly slogs on, with some other random story about JK Simmons playing some creepy doctor who takes pictures of women without tops on to blackmail them, or some shit like that. I dunno. I was falling asleep during most of this plotline and was only woken up when something fell off the refrigerator in my apartment and loudly made noise as it hit the floor. That's really how I finished the rest of this movie, because that happened.

A lot of other very dull things happen, and then it's revealed that the bad guy is actually Harry Hole's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend! DUN DUN DUN! What a nonsensical twist! It turns out HE was the kid in the beginning of the movie with the jackass stepfather or whoever that was. And he says he's been killing women because he's judged them for getting abortions, not knowing who their kids' fathers were, and other things. I'm sure a better movie could've made this compelling, developed his character or added social commentary, but The Snowman was just like “fuck that!” and didn't do it at all. And seriously, 'guy who was totally inconspicuous and nice the whole movie is actually the killer'? That was the BEST you could do? Even people in comas for the last 30 years would find that trite and overdone.

So instead we just get a dumb final battle scene where Harry Hole chases the killer out into the wide-open icy field. When he loses track of him somehow – there doesn't seem to be many places to hide out there – Harry just stands in place and screams for the killer to come face him. Real badass! Except the guy instead just shoots him from far away. Man, people just have no honor anymore.

Then the killer comes close, making some bullshit speech no doubt, and falls through a hole in the ice, dying instantly in the freezing cold. So really, Harry Hole didn't do all that much of anything to stop the guy. If this had been happening in the summertime, he would've just been murdered point blank. What a hero!

There wasn't really anything worth watching in this. Two hours of complete bullshit, nonsense time-wasting. In the interest of ending this review and not wasting YOUR time anymore, avoid the movie. There. Done!

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