Netflix Really Missed The Mark With This Mads Mikkelsen Action Thriller

When you think of Mads Mikkelsen, your brain probably locks onto the captivating villains he's played on screen, be it Le Chiffre from "Casino Royale," Hannibal Lecter in "Hannibal," or even Jürgen Voller in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." What you may not think about (not right away, at least) is Mikkelsen the dancer. 

It's true: after studying at the world-famous ballet academy in Gothenburg, Sweden (aka. the Balettakademien), the Danish actor spent a decade as a professional dancer before getting into acting. He would go on to put his ballet skills to incredible use in the opening fight in "Hannibal" season 2, as well as the memorable drunken dance scene that went viral from director Thomas Vinterberg's Danish dramedy "Another Round." With his physical grace and screen charisma, it was probably inevitable somebody would have the idea to cast Mikkelsen as the protagonist in a post-"John Wick" assassin thriller (of which there've been many).

That's precisely what Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund did on "Polar," a Netflix action flick that was released to little fanfare in January 2019. Written by Jayson Rothwell and based on Víctor Santos's comic book "Polar: Came From the Cold," the film casts Mikkelsen as Duncan Vizla/The Black Kaiser, an assassin who works for Damocles, an organization that gives its employees a handsome pension to retire once they reach 50. When Damocles conspires to have him killed before he can collect, Duncan double-crosses their double-cross before demanding what he's owed and retiring to the same remote cabin all aging assassins retire to in movies ... only for his past to inevitably come knocking.

Derivative tropes aside, the setup for "Polar" doesn't sound all that sillier than "John Wick" and its own rigidly-structured assassin bureaucracy. It's the execution that makes "Polar" a misfire.

"Polar" holds a decidedly bad 18 percent score among Rotten Tomatoes critics, with its Critics Consensus reading, "An action thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen as the world's most dangerous assassin should be terrifically entertaining, but 'Polar' proves it's possible to ruin anything if you try." That more or less sums up the problems with the movie. It's got all the flash and bang you could ask for your buck, but where "John Wick" brought a thematic richness and polished visual flair to its B-movie underpinning, "Polar" is sloppily constructed and emotionally hollow. It's also repetitively bloody and unknowingly exploitive, to the degree that it could almost (but not quite) pass for a Paul Verhoeven-styled European satire of hyper-violent Hollywood genre fare

Clearly, however, somebody believes the masses have a fever and the only prescription is more of Mikkelsen's Black Kaiser and his mustache. In a baffling turn of events, it was announced in May 2022 that Mikkelsen is reprising his role as Duncan Vizla in "The Black Kaiser," a film that's not "a sequel or a prequel" but a new take on the "Polar" comic books. Derrick Borte ("Unhinged") has since signed on to direct instead of Åkerlund, with an eye on starting production in the fall of 2023. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the writers' and actors' strikes have impacted those plans.

Can Borte succeed where Åkerlund failed? "Unhinged" was a functional pulpy B-movie that fancied itself as something more (and was mostly held afloat by Russell Crowe's bug-eyed performance as the villain), but the fact we're already getting some kind of "Polar" reboot just goes to show how much the original movie really missed the mark in the first place.