Review of The Snowman (2017) by Mark J — 10 Sep 2018

"The Snowman" is an awful movie. It somehow has too little going on - gaps in the storytelling that make it incomprehensible - and is weirdly repetitive. It definitely isn't thrilling or scary or whatever else a serial killer mystery thriller is supposed to be. In addition to Fassbender and Ferguson, "The Snowman" has an excellent supporting cast. It includes Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, J.K. Simmons, Chloë Sevigny, and Val Kilmer. Unfortunately, all of them have bizarre roles in the movie. Gainsbourg is an important character at first, but for some reason begins behaving erratically and irrationally later in the movie. Toby Jones is one of those actors you're pleasantly surprised to see in any movie, but has little to do here. And J.K. Simmons has a bizarre accent for reasons I can't discern. The movie plays him up to be an important character (he's trying to secure Oslo as the city to host the soccer world cup), but by the end of it, it's hard to see why he even needed to be in the picture. The two actors who the movie mistreats the most are Sevigny and Kilmer. Sevigny briefly shows up as a woman who quickly gets murdered, and then she shows up again as the dead woman's twin sister, who says little more than "I'm her twin sister" before disappearing from the movie.

Kilmer's plot thread is even more confusing. He plays a policeman who was on the killer's tail some years previously, I think? At some point, he comes across a dead body, stares at it for a minute, and fires a gun into the air. In another scene, he's in the police station and gets a note from the killer, then walks over to a window in another room and climbs out through it. Oh, and almost all of his lines are dubbed by another actor. Pretty bad around.