He is more like Patricia Highsmith's psychopathic antihero Tom Ripley than Raffles, EW Hornung's gentleman thief. Roger is not particularly likable and his vicious world of international commerce is unattractive, though it glitters in a Mad Men way. He then proceeds with a poised wit to demonstrate his manipulative gifts by bending a client to his will while extracting the information he needs to steal a valuable lithograph of Edvard Munch's The Brooch. His headhunting enables him to case the careers and homes of rich, middle-class applicants who own valuable paintings.ĭuring the opening credits, Roger's no-nonsense voiceover explains the five rules of art theft.
Between the two activities there is what Roger and his business associates would call synergy. More significantly, to pay for his extravagance, he has a lucrative sideline in stealing works of art with the assistance of a cheerful crook employed by a security firm. Roger has a highly paid job as a headhunter, recruiting senior managerial talent for leading international corporations. Topically, her favourite artist (in the novel at least) is Damien Hirst. She's high maintenance, partly because of her clothes but mainly because Roger subsidises the fashionable Oslo art gallery she runs and has installed her in the modernist house he feels is her due. Headhunters is narrated by the suave, secretive, deeply self-conscious business executive Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), who is nearly as proud of his fine head of hair as he is of his trophy wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), a beautiful Amazonian blonde several inches taller than him and with a degree in art history. Nesbø's other books feature tough, hard-drinking Oslo police inspector Harry Hole (pronounced "Hurler"). The film is adapted from a novel by Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian crime writer who is now up there beside the Swedes Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and the screenplay is the work of Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg, old hands at this kind of thing, the latter having adapted novels by both Mankell and Larsson. They'll have trouble in making a movie half as good or half as authentic.Īlthough inevitably indebted to American models, Headhunters is firmly rooted in the Scandinavian experience, and it moves with the speed of a demented lemming heading for the cliff-edge of a fjord. An American company acquired the rights to remake Morten Tyldum's Headhunters while it was still in production. T he cinema, as Karl Marx might have said, repeats itself, first as a Scandinavian thriller, then as a Hollywood remake.
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