Homework to the 17,12,2015

Welcome to the punch – Headhunters

In the last weeks we saw the tow thrillers Headhunters and welcome to the punch. They are thrillers because they have typical elements that significate that a movie is a thriller. The use of music, tone and happening was typical for a thriller. But both movies aren’t that what I expected when I hear thriller.

The movie Hadehunters is a Norwegian-Swedish action thriller about the live of Roger Brown who supports his luxurious lifestyle by stealing paintings. He tries with everything to make his wife happy and to make her love him. He and his with are both having a affair with someone else because they aren’t happy together. All that Diana (his wife) wonts is a child.

This reminds me to the fairy story Rumpelstiltskin and how we learnt is everything a remix so I would say that this is similar to the main plot of Rumpelstiltskin. After and after roger gets more in trouble and the film gets really abstract and unrealistic. It’s all about one topic insecurities. The protagonist is insecure, because he is not the perfect man. He is too small, he is not the best looking guy and he is hiding his secret life as a robber. All his doings are going back to his insecurities. Insecurities are used in movies to give the audience the opportunity to relate them self to the problems and the persons in movies. I didn’t liked the movie because it was too graphically and unrealistic for me. The thrilling part where thrilling because they were bloody and that’s more the characteristic of a horror. I prefer psychic thrillers and I couldn’t relate myself to this movie.

The second not so typical thriller that we saw was welcome to the punch. It´s a British action thriller which had a high budget ($8.5 million) but the result is in my opinion not in a balance with the opportunities that you can use with that budget. The movie is beautiful, and what I mean with beautiful the shots are perfect. Everything looks like a car advert but that’s the problem. The movie is not personal. You don’t believe in the characters. You don’t know the protagonist so you don’t care about him. All the characters aren´t authentic. Also the locations aren’t relatable. A typical thriller would be located in a usual place for example at home. So the audience can imagen the same evet in their own house. But all the locations in welcome to the punch are too grey, too impersonal, too plain.

Both movies aren’t the typical version of a thriller. It was interesting to see how different a thriller can be and if you compare them you can find some similarities. Both are quit violent and the protagonist are both middle aged men. In my opinion their both aren’t filmed in the best localisations and there are both not my favourite movies. But the characterisation of Headhunters is much better than from Welcome to the punch. It was a good example to see what happened if you don’t think about the background of your characters. It was also a good example that a high budget doesn’t promise a good and successful film. Headhunters had just a third of the budget and the film is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time.