'The Snowman' Review: Booooo!

⛄ The Snowman ⛄ Review ⛄ 5/10 ⛄

Based on a novel by Jo Nesbø, this crime thriller has a promising director and a strong cast, but it's a shambolic mess, with baffling flashbacks, excessive padding, and an overall shit execution.

Surprisingly filmmaker Tomas Alfredson previously gave the world Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -- both really good film adaptations of novels -- so there was no reason up-front to worry that The Snowman could be any less, hence why I was confident (was being the key word) that this could of been good. And it starts well enough, using Oslo's snowy atmosphere as interesting backdrop.

But the characters and their almost-random behavior begin to undo things very fast. Flashbacks to a character played by Val Kilmer are profoundly bad; Kilmer wears strange makeup, and his voice is clearly dubbed very badly by another actor. Digital visual effects depicting gory scenes look flat and unfinished. And there seems to be no end to silly coincidences and drawn-out scenes of a character simply getting from one place to another.

Frankly, there's no real reason that the main characters should team up in the first place, other than the fact that he has no driver's license and she does, that is literally it! The mystery at the center isn't so bad, but the murkiness in getting to it make The Snowman not worth the effort at all.