Metacritic reviews

Mads Mikkelsen and Vanessa Hudgens’ on-screen chemistry bring some much-needed heart to Polar’s bloodsoaked story.

The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.

Polar is pure trash, but the generousness — and, in the final stretch, the poignancy — with which Mikkelsen approaches even the most lurid of the film's conceits at least pushes it toward the top of the garbage heap.

Every second grates and confuses in equal measure, with nary a thrill of inventive, exciting action filmmaking to break up the monotony.

Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.

A gross, stupid and relentlessly ugly film from start to finish, this may not be the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Netflix Originals but nothing else worthy of that title immediately springs to mind.

Gratuitous sex, gruesome torture, copious amounts of gore, and garish imagery populate the picture. Those qualities might be reason enough for some to watch, although a great many others would do well to scroll right past it on their Netflix feeds.

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

If only the issue with Polar, Åkerlund’s fifth feature film, was merely shallowness. Polar is an execrable motion picture, a sad, lint-filled key bump scraped together from the bottom of the post-Tarantino ’90s exploitation baggie.

It’s not tolerable as even basic movie sustenance, or adventurous cuisine, and it’s a f*cking revolting mess.