Polar

 Polar is a John-Wick-like Netflix production that came and went, like most Netflix stuff, without any fanfare or promotion back in 2019. Playing an assassin already legendary in the world of assassins this time is Mads Mikkelsen - codename: Black Kaiser.
 It's a shame that these movies copy everything off John Wick, but none of them have carried on the tradition of calling their protagonists after legendary witches. They could have called Mikkelsen's character Wicked Witch of the North. I'm sure that's probably why no one seemed to like it.

 Polar (I have no idea why it's called that; if it was explained, I missed it) distinguishes itself from the pack of John Wick clones by being a lot more tasteless than the rest, having a slightly more sedate pace, and to be honest, by not having all that great action.

 And by tasteless, I mean it absolutely wallows in being crass. It's a pretty sleazy movie: one of the first scenes fixates on the slowly deflating tentpole erection on a corpse; seems fitting that said corpse is played by Johnny Knoxville. The same team of assassins that killed that guy is later trying to kill a morbidly obese man, and they can't get through the neck fat as he struggles and throws food at them. A cute French Bulldog gets shot as a kind of funny joke/John Wick reference. It's that sort of movie.

 The premise is ridiculous and kind of funny: to keep its financial books in the green, a company that manages assassins decides to activate a clause where if one of their employed assassins dies, their pensions go back to the company. The way to activate it is by assassinating said assassins, of course. Might be just me, but that doesn't sound like a great long-term strategy... might not foster a lot of confidence in the assassins you send to kill the senior assassin employees. And of course, they didn't count on one of their assassins being so preternaturally good that he can assassinate the assassins sent to assassinate him, and a small army besides. Sorry, got carried away; Assassin is a fun word.

Ol' Kaiser is a couple of weeks off hitting fifty, the mandatory retirement age at his company, so his grotesque goblin of a  boss Blut (Matt Lucas, a British comedian I dislike whose main schtick is being cringeworthy) sends him off to kill a target in Minsk. Of course it's a trap, but in a clever move Kaiser kills the target just after formally accepting the job, so the ambush is foiled.

 Blut then sends the A-team after him, which takes a whole chunk of the movie as they track Kaiser via the information they got from his accountant. The A team are a bunch of young hotshots that dress in very tacky outfits and callously kill all witnesses. Not a great bunch of characters, but memorable, and the movie does a good job of making them hateable.

 Meanwhile Kaiser-let's start calling him by his name, Duncan, this is getting a little weird. Meanwhile Duncan, beginning his retirement on a small town in the American north (polar?) befriends his young neighbour Camille (Vanessa Hudgens), who's carrying some obvious damage around. I'm guessing this is why Netflix's stupid little blurb describes the film as " 'John Wick' meets 'The Professional' ".

 As you might expect, the storylines converge and the A-team try to take Duncan out in his cabin (with a honeypot trap that features highly acrobatic sex; Duncan is indeed good at everything.
 And that includes taking out teams of assassins. In a surprising move, the whole A-team except one is killed while we're still in the second act. So Duncan then needs to go face off against Blut and the rest of the organization (a bunch of faceless goons, booo) to save Camille. There's a few complications (a surprising amount of stuff happens during this movie), but things get resolved more or less as you'd expect.

 It's pretty comedic in tone, and the jokes are very hit or miss... I guess the good news is that some of them are pretty funny, then. The action is not great (very quick edits, and the moves are fairly basic - nothing approaching the grace or invention that we'd seen by then in the Wicks and Atomic Blonde). But director Jonas Åkerlund has been doing videos since forever, so it's pretty stylish; a lot of that style is unfortunately channeled towards the annoying 'in your face!' aforementioned crassness, but there are a lot of good bits too, and it always shows Mikkelsen in the most badass of lights possible, which is the correct approach in this sort of film.
 The soundtrack is pretty good, too, courtesy of Deadmau5.

 It's not a bad movie, exactly, but the story kind of deflates like that erection at the beginning, and the various resolutions end up being somewhat unsatisfying. There's way too much time spent with Hudgens character that doesn't seem to be going anywhere - nice character building moments, to be sure, but a bit extraneous - and when the twist arrives that finally makes sense of her character, it almost feels like an afterthought after she's been fridged for so long. I dunno, Mads Mikkelsen as John Wick deserved better than a forgettable Netflix #content catalog filler, but I wouldn't be against watching a sequel.