Review of The Snowman (2017) by John M — 18 Feb 2018

Why hello there, Mr. Police. So this is about a detective that for some reason is named Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender). He's a barely functioning alcoholic, but he has a case to solve. A serial killer is going around decapitating his victims and replacing heads of snowmen with those that he has murdered and vice versa.

Now I had heard how infamous this one was going in, and I considered myself to be fully prepared. I mainly took the time with it so I can release a respectable worst of the year list. It lived up to the hype, and this pulled off the extremely difficult feat of being both fascinating and put-you-to-sleep boring at the same time.

This is coming from a respectable director, Tomas Alfredson. He did Let the Right One In which I was a big fan of, and while I personally didn't care for the dull Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it resonated with critics for some reason.

From what I hear, this production was a giant mess while it was being assembled, and the word on the street is that they didn't even complete filming of this. The director has gone on record and said that there is about 10 - 15% of the screenplay that didn't even get shot.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine having a 300 page story with no binding. You fumble it and a gust of wind blows 30 - 45 random pages away. Now your boss tells you that you still have to tell the story from start to finish.

You'd have gaping holes in the narrative that would be impossible to account for, and it wouldn't make for any type of story that would work, never mind a murder mystery of all things. The Snowman is not incompetently shot, it is just literally everything else about it that doesn't work.

The biggest problem is the editing hack job that was done with garden sheers, as it makes the story unintelligible. Nothing about this makes sense, from the song Popcorn by Hot Butter being the killer's calling card to the fact that snowmen aren't remotely scary from a horror standpoint.

I was on the verge of falling asleep several times throughout, but whenever I reached that point, it did something so goofy that it jolted me awake. The Snowman is just as incoherent as everyone has been saying, and you'd have to stretch like Armstrong to pay this movie a compliment.