THE SNOWMAN (2017) **

The way people crapped on this movie when it first came out had me hopeful it was going to be some sort of camp trash classic.  I mean, Michael Fassbender plays a guy named “Harry Hole”.  That right there should’ve been the jumping off point for hilarity.  Unfortunately, nobody ever calls him out for having a goofy name.  What the Hell?

Harry Hole is an alcoholic burnout detective in Oslo.  His latest assignment is to solve a rash of murders.  It seems a serial killer is offing single mothers who all were once treated at an abortion clinic.  Predictably, Harry’s wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) also becomes a target.  

The serial killing scenes aren’t bad.  Our boy uses an automatic cinching tool to slice off people’s body parts, kind of like in Dario Argento’s Trauma.  He also puts severed heads on snowmen, strews body parts in the snow, and leaves taunting messages to Hole.  He certainly had the potential to be a memorable screen psycho.  Its just that the movie itself is rather inert, murky, and joyless.  The snowcapped setting is picturesque, but director Tomas (Let the Right One In) Alfredson just never really cranks up the suspense enough to make it crackle.  

If The Snowman is worth seeing, it’s for Fassbender’s performance.  Sure, his character is a walking cliché, but he’s pretty great in it.  I liked also like Rebecca Ferguson as his young partner who’s just itching to make a collar.  I just wish they had a better script to work with.  Val Kilmer is also in it for a bit as another detective.  Sadly, his lines had to be dubbed because his throat was ravaged by cancer, and the weird voice they gave him kind of adds to the oddness of his performance.  J.K. Simmons also pops up and is criminally underutilized as a pervy philanthropist/obvious red herring.  

So, The Snowman wasn’t the camp classic I was hoping for.  Nor is it an accomplished serial killer thriller.  As it is, it falls somewhere in the middle.  If it wasn’t for Fassbender’s committed performance (and his character’s hilarious name), it wouldn’t even be memorable.