Duncan, known in the environment of the killers as the infallible Black Kaiser, is close to retirement, who would like to enjoy in a remote and snowy area, away from everything and everyone. He accepted a last assignment, conceived as a trap, but survived without problems and in the meantime he met a young woman with whom he began a friendship. Blut, head of the organization of assassins for which Duncan has worked for decades, wants to eliminate the agents who are close to retirement and have no heirs, then assign to a deadly team the task of doing so. But the Black Kaiser is not at all an easy target and the war between him and Blut will live a continuous escalation …
Taken from the silent webcomic of Victor Santos, also published in Italy by Panini, Polar is directed by Jonas Åkerlund with a taste for excess, hyperventiveness and saturated colors, as if it were an even more pulp and exaggerated version of John Wick.
The Swedish Åkerlund, who also did not have a brilliant career at the cinema, is known above all for his numerous videoclips, made for several great artists and where he also found spaces for decidedly provocative works, such as Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ . Recently he found a cult aura also at the cinema thanks to Lords of Chaos, still unpublished in Italy and dedicated to some heinous crimes really happened in the 90s in Oslo, linked to the black metal scene, with a Rory Culkin of which they say wonders . Unfortunately, Polar is much less disruptive and even more like an attempt to tarantineggiare with violence and explicit scenes in the colors very spintissimi, not unlike a flop a few years ago as The Losers by Sylvain White, not surprisingly drawn from a comic broadly betrayed.
It does not want to do, of course, a question of loyalty, but if Polar of Santos had succeeded it was by virtue of its essentiality, both graphic with black and white nectysimi and only some red element, in the wake of the Frank Miller of Sin City, both narrative, so as to be originally without even dialogues or captions (then added, however, very park, for the volume version). This stylistic abstraction was based on an absolutely basic plot and on monolithic characters, who do not try to justify themselves and conquer the reader only for their style and their ingenious efficiency.