Director Morten Tyldum and writer Jo Nesbø—the latter is a hugely successful crime novelist in their native Norway—deliberately wrong-foot the audience with a pro forma opening in which Hennie enumerates the rules of a successful heist in voiceover. But just before the familiarity puts anyone to sleep, in walks Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game Of Thrones’ Jaime Lannister), whose ambition for the top spot at a GPS firm has a distinctly feral edge. At first, Hennie only processes the details of the Reubens canvas hanging on his mark’s wall—a painting previously stolen by the Nazis—but when a guilty phone call leads to the discovery of his wife’s mobile phone amid Coster-Waldau’s sheets, Hennie’s suspicions are belatedly aroused.
From that point on, Headhunters’ title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse. Hennie has never faced more than a prison term, but all of a sudden he’s running for his life, fleeing an adversary whose specialty is tracking others down. Bodily fluids flow freely, faces are turned to pulp, and an outhouse serves as a hiding place of last resort. Hennie, whose sub-average height serves as a motivator for his character’s one-upsmanship, is one of his country’s biggest domestic stars (Headhunters just missed the box-office record set by his 2008 film Max Manus), but here, he’s a perpetually endangered underdog, struggling to remain the hero of his own story. Scarred, humiliated, and eventually shorn, he looks less and less the part of a leading man, while the implacable Coster-Waldau seems to travel with his own touch-up team, forever hovering just out of frame. Not everyone can play the lead, of course, and there’s a nobility in accepting that fact. The increased life expectancy is merely a fringe benefit.
