Blu-ray

Norwegian author Jo Nesbrø is best known for his crime novels featuring detective Harry Hole. But while we wait for that character to make the jump to the bigscreen, fans (and everybody else) would do well to check out this gripping and surprisingly witty action-thriller adapted from one of his stand-alone novels.

Aksel Hennie stars as Roger Brown, a successful headhunter who leads a secret life as an art thief. The trouble starts when his latest target turns out to be a former mercenary who is soon hot on Roger’s trail and looking to kill him with extreme prejudice.

Picture: In the accompanying featurette on the disc, cinematographer John Andreas Andersen outlines how the filmmakers hoped to make Headhunters look like a glossy Hollywood action thriller, albeit done on a much smaller budget.

Well, this Blu-ray’s attractively cinematic AVC 2.40:1 1080p encode leaves you in no doubt that they succeeded. There’s a richness and solidity to the visuals, aided by plenty of fine detailing and excellent black level depth. Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before it, colours veer towards a cooler, more subdued palette, but it’s clearly an aesthetic decision rather than a problem with the film’s hi-def transfer.
Picture rating: 4/5

Audio: The filmmakers may have succeeded in cooking up a thriller that is stylistically on par with its Hollywood peers, but you’d be hard-pushed to say that the same is true of the film’s soundtrack. Headhunters’ DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundscape proves to be a pretty low-key affair at all times. While this doesn’t really impact on the dialogue that drives the movie, but there simply isn’t any great sense of dynamism to the mix. Take the car crash in Chapter 8 as an example. Putting the rumble of the truck’s engine in the rears in the build up to the crash works well at building tension. But the crash itself is a bit of a damp squib and there’s simply no ‘oomph’ to the resulting impact.

It’s worth noting that the above applies to the film’s original Norwegian-language track. The disc also features a DTS-HD MA 5.1 English-language dub, but I’m sorry to say that I only could only manage about 10-minutes of that abomination. Suffice to say, much of the dubbed dialogue sounds like it’s being spoken by people in recording booths, so I can’t imagine the audio engineers will have added any additional dynamics to the rest of the mix.
Audio rating:  3/5

Extras: This Blu-ray scrapes by with the bare minimum of bonus features. In addition to the trailer, there’s also a solid 23-min Making of… documentary, featuring interviews with the key cast, director, cinematographer and producers.
Extras rating: 1.5

We say: It would be a crime not to hunt down this superior thriller in Blu-ray

Momentum Pictures, Region B BD, £25 Approx, On sale now
HCC VERDICT: 3.5/5