Movie Reaction: The Snowman

Formula: Gone Girl * The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Gone Girl got my hopes up. Films based on international best sellers* have always been a mixed bag. I suppose The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo really started the latest trend of crime novel adaptations. Gone Girl felt like a high point in 2014 though. Profitable. Big names. Critically loved. Then, The Girl onthe Train was the first real imitator to follow and only matched Gone Girl in tone. The Snowman takes more after TGwtDT and tries to satiate that same appetite for dark crime mysteries. It fails all around.

*An accomplishment that isn't quite as impressive as it used to be.

The crimes this movie follows involve a killer who builds snowmen in front of houses where he kills people, because it's Norway and everything they do is in snow. Michael Fassbender plays and alcoholic detective who the murderer lures into investigating his crimes. Rebecca Ferguson is another detective who joins the investigation, although she has a little more invested in the case than Fassbender at first realizes. Fassbender has an "adopted" son and an ex-girlfriend who he lets down all the time. Fassbender and Ferguson run into a variety of characters played by JK Simmons, Val Kilmer, Chloe Sevigny and others. Simmons is a billionaire creep who is trying to get the World Cup Winter Games (which, I guess, are a thing) in Oslo. Kilmer is a detective who died years ago when investigating the Snowman. Sevigny is just a woman who got an abortion at some point. 

The story is too big for the screenplay. I try not to compare movies to the book, especially if I haven't read the book. Occasionally, you can sense a fidelity to the source material is really mucking the movie up. There are a lot of moving parts in The Snowman. There's a lot of interconnectivity. Too much, in fact. Or, rather, there's little payoff to the connections that are made. I never felt any suspense because I never really knew what was going on. The killer is a criminal mastermind, capable of breaking into any building, cleaning up any crime scene, evading even being known about by the police, and accessing whatever information he needs about a victim he's stalking. It's never all that clear how. He just can, because he's a brilliant killer. However, his endgame and how it all plays out is pretty stupid, really just because the story needs it to fall apart. I'm sure the book was clever. The movie was not.

It can't be a coincidence that the last two Tomas Alfredson movies I saw in theaters (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and this) had me fighting off sleep for a good portion of them (something I rarely have a problem with). This film is deliberately slowly paced. It calls so little attention to itself that I often missed the point of a scene until about 15 seconds after it ended. I'm pretty sure I missed why the killer even used snowmen to mark his crimes. I mean, I caught a reason why, but it was so dumb that I immediately dismissed it and thought "there's gotta be something better than that". The movie likes killing characters off more than having any of them around. Fassbender looks lost throughout the movie. Everyone else has a look on their face like "why did I prepare so much for this if I'm only going to be in 3 scenes after editing?".

This movie didn't work at all for me. It's a sleepy thriller that spends most of the time straining plausibility. I didn't care about any of the characters. I didn't even care who the killer was. I couldn't find a single way to buy into the movie.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend