MPAA Rating: R/ Genre: Crime Drama-“Thriller”/ Stars: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons, Val Kilmer (!), Toby Jones, Jonas Karlsson, James D’Arcy, Chloe Sevigny/ Runtime: 119 minutes
*sigh well I hope you are all happy movie goers. I say that because I am starting off this review by stating that it is only out of a deep sense of respect for all of you who read my work that I am even currently writing up a review for the “film” that I just sat through. That being said I put the word film in quotes because on paper I am positive that is what The Snowman looked like: I mean here is a ”film” that, on paper, not only boasts an amazing cast, and a solid director, but is also based on a popular source material. So with all of those various factors coming to play in this playground this is a “film” that, in every way possible, should have at least provided two hours of distraction if not a rock solid mystery…. Unfortunately dear viewer as my fellow critics and I can sadly attest this movie can’t even achieve the movie you put on as background noise to help you sleep level of bad. Instead The Snowman is a complete and total misfire that in between feeling thoroughly disjointed and incomplete and not to mention leaving the viewer filled with confusion, rather than tension that we quickly see that this is a “film” that truly is much less than the sum of its parts….In fact, to coin a certain tagline, “if you have all the clues” then you should honestly have seen this coming from a mile away……
Now somehow this movie has something resembling a plot and in that regard here is what I can best venture a guess as to what this “film” is about: the unfortunately named Harry Hole (and YES that is his name so please get the giggles out of your system now guys) (an utterly one dimensional Michael Fassbender) is a police detective based out of Oslo, Norway, and once upon a time (if you can believe it) Hole was once one of the best detectives in the country, but more recently he’s given in to the bottle (of course with a name like Harry Hole….I can see how one might go down that road). So in his efforts to find a case to help keep his mind off drinking (and his name), Harry finds himself nosing in on a missing person case that is being handled by newcomer Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) that she believes is connected to several others that have been going for years with the only link between all of the cases being the fact that a snowman was built in the area where each of the victims was last seen. Of course with what kind of movie this it isn’t long before Harry and Katrine find themselves realizing that they may in fact be beginning to investigate what appears to be the work of an elusive and especially vicious serial killer…..
Now after having written that down and looked it over I can see that even that brief summary which I just gave you feels completely more loose at the seams and way more complicated than it needs to be, but therein lies the major issue with The Snowman. Indeed this is a “film” that truly feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a collection of scenes that were filmed and then subsequently thrown together in what could best be said is vaguely the correct order. Indeed it’s also almost as if the screenwriters just got together and compiled all the key scenes from the original Jo Nesbø novel, wrote them out, and then when they discovered they already had two hours of material, decided to pack it up and go home. A decision that I feel you should know has the result of producing for your “viewing agony” some of if not the most uneven storytelling in a feature film in recent memory. Also this is a film that does an amazing job of setting us up with several questions that we will never ever be given an answer to including, but not limited to: We’re told that police academy students study Harry Hole’s old cases, but we never see an example from Harry as to why they would seeing as this guy seems to solve crime purely by accident, Why did Harry become a drunk, Why did the script make Harry a drunk since it doesn’t impact the story in any way, why in the bloody heck is there an entire subplot of this film dedicated to bringing the bloody Olympics or World Cup to Oslo, and my personal favorites, and I will be going into this whole debacle in full in the next section of the review: why are there flashbacks, featuring Val Kilmer as a second drunk cop, when those scenes ultimately go nowhere, why is Val Kilmer’s voice dubbed in some of the worst dialogue looping in the history of cinema, and perhaps most importantly of all: Why is Val Kilmer or his character even in this when all you have to do is take 5 minutes (if that) to explain his character and what happens to him rather than waste 20 plus minutes’ worth of film to do so? Indeed these are all questions that go hilariously and quite frustratingly unanswered.
Speaking of Val Kilmer however…..I feel that if there aren’t any warning bells going off in your head about this movie beforehand then number one: shame on you and number two: the first clear indicator/ warning sign that this film is going to be a straight-up cataclysm of truly epic yet hilarious proportions comes when Kilmer enters the picture in a flashback straight out of left field as a detective investigating the same killer’s crimes in the city of Bergen nine years earlier. The problem however isn’t so much that as it is when it’s Kilmer’s turn to speak in his first scene, the film decides to cut abruptly to a shot from behind Kilmer’s head so that he’s only visible as a silhouette to the point that as his shoulders jerk as he talks, you feel like you are watching a puppet being operated by an unseen hand, and while it’s only subtly disorienting at first it gets a lot more wild and out of The Twilight Zone when you realize that the voice that’s purportedly coming out of Kilmer’s mouth doesn’t sound like him at all, and when the film finally cuts to his face on his third (of three total if I remember for this scene) lines, it quickly becomes very clear that Kilmer’s lines have been redubbed by another actor and redubbed very very badly. Like blimp named Hindenburg, or ship named Titanic badly.
Of course the film doesn’t learn from this blunder and so Kilmer’s second appearance in the film, in yet another flashback, is even stranger as we see him arriving at a snowy mountaintop where the pieces of a missing woman’s body have been deposited, and laid out like the pieces of a bloody jigsaw (oh how I would’ve loved this to be set in the same universe as SAW) puzzle, but this time his character doesn’t speak at all. Now normally this would be a good thing for those of us with ears. Unfortunately this is a film that seems to have been worked on by aliens and since they don’t care about mankind the scene, which runs for several minutes, is then narrated by a disembodied voice on a walkie-talkie, a fact that also doesn’t cover over how strange its jagged cutting is. Then, against all odds, the scene actually manages to get even weirder as not only do other characters talk to Kilmer, and he never responds, but mere moments later he’s standing on a peak, firing a gun into the air and scaring a flock of birds. Now after that Kilmer has three more scenes in the entire film including a wordless one where he finds a note sent to him by the killer, one where he climbs out the window of a police station and harasses/flips off a barely in this (lucky him) Toby Jones, and a final, extremely brief one that I won’t spoil here. In all, and this is a generous assessment, he has maybe 10 lines of spoken dialogue, and all with that same non-Kilmer-ish voice, and honestly the fact that he looks absolutely dreadful combined with just the pure absurdity of his scenes and the horrific ADR voice dubbing work really makes me feel like this is a performance that could have most definitely be left on the cutting room floor.
Now while the story is, obviously, a nightmare, this movie still might have been salvageable if it were in possession of a great performance or two from its cast. Unfortunately, for the film and the audience, that doesn’t happen either. This is because while I’ve seen Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsborough, and J.K. Simmons all do uniformly great work in the past I can honestly say that had you never seen anything these actors have done in the past you would have a hard time believing me because every performance in this movie is completely and utterly flatter than a flat tire to the point that Fassbender’s lifeless performance here in this garage dump makes his Assassin’s Creed role look absolutely frenetic and lively by comparison. With that however we also get a complete and utter lack of tension in this film from start to finish because hey why should we in the audience care about what’s going on if it doesn’t look like anybody on screen does? I mean it really is almost as if everybody involved in The Snowman knew from the start that this “film” wasn’t going to work, and so they, wanting to just make some easy money, jointly agreed to put forth the absolute minimum effort required to get it over with so they could get paid and go home.
Finally we come to the “mystery” that the “film” presents us with. Please notice that I put the word mystery in quotes, and the reason behind that is due to me finding myself forced by Lady Decency to put the word mystery in quotes is because I will wager that you movie goers will almost certainly figure this one out wayyy before the final reveal. Now you may be asking “Well how can that be?” Well it’s not because the film lays out the clues in any particularly noteworthy way because not only does it not do that at all, but in fact the clues barely exist at all. It’s also not because you will also see that by film’s end it turns out everything you saw truly was built upon plot contrivance and convenience though that is the case. No the reason you poor devils who watch this film will figure out who the killer is because the identity of the killer is based solely and 100% on the fact that they are the only character left by the end who it could be so that there really is no mystery to be found here….other than why this movie was even made, but as stated that is one mystery that will most likely NEVER be solved.
All in all director Tomas Alfredson did try to stop the bleeding as much as he possibly could by coming out during press interviews and saying that filming of this fiasco was rushed and that a significant portion of this film’s script was never filmed, but at the end of the day that is simply a terrible excuse. I say that because if what he is saying is true and if this was truly the best that could be done under the circumstances that were handed to the cast and crew then maybe, and I know this is a wild and crazy thought, but maybe this simply wasn’t worth making either until all parties were fully onboard and invested or even at all. Indeed this is a movie that can only be recommended if you are either absolutely bored out of your mind, have a desire to lose 2 hours of your life, or you have an obsession with seeing the worst films that each year throws our way and should you be dumb enough, or bored/desperate/curious enough to watch this, from the seriously terrible performances to the god-awful editing to honestly this just being a movie that has absolutely no bloody idea what it wants to even be about The Snowman is one trip through a winter blunderland you won’t soon forget….as much as I promise you’ll want to. On a scale of 1–5 I give The Snowman a solid 1.5 out of 5.
