To be fair, the makers of this pulpy, if too dry, action-adventure seem to know what they’re doing, or at least where to stick jokes, character development, and perfunctory bloodletting. They also seem to have very literally translated a novel to a visual medium without consideration for how listless, flat, and charmless this globe-trotting chase movie might now look. Case in point: when we first meet Kristin (Vivian Olafsdottir), she’s meticulously dressing down Runolfur (Hjortur Johann Jonsson), a lazy mansplaining colleague, using Powerpoint-style slides that reveal exactly how Runolfur’s tried to sell “old wine in new bottles,” according to Kristin.
We also see Kristin sharing a pseudo-playful conversation with her explorer brother Elias (Atli Oskar Fjalarsson) right before he and his team are approached by smiling Julie Ratoff (Adesuwa Oni) and her armed goons. Elias hastily texts Kristin some video footage of the Nazi plane that he and his hapless companions have stumbled upon. Kristin must soon also deal with Julie, who kills one of Elias’ friends with a pencil and then, in a later scene, tortures someone else with a pencil.
Elias and Kristin’s pre-Julie conversation checks off some dramatic boxes, but in such basic ways that you can’t help but wish that the screenwriters had either rewritten or tried a new approach to this establishing scene. They kid around with each other and talk about their stillborn love lives as if they were distractedly working their way through a checklist of social prompts. Then Julie shows up, and her smile is as unconvincing as Oni’s performance. She asks for Elias and his team’s contact information, and the tension is so hilariously slack that the by-the-numbers bloodletting that follows seems even more underwhelming.
Julie works for the icy CIA agent William Carr (Iain Glen), whom we know is a bad man since, in his first scene, he plays with his grandchildren. William also employs Simon (Wotan Wilke Mohring), a sneaky but laughably conspicuous killer who follows Kristin around Iceland but somehow fails to kill her, and Steve (Jack Fox), her well-read will-they/won’t-they companion. Simon kills and/or roughs up some bystanders, but most of his character-defining aggression, like Julie’s pencil trick, happens off-screen.
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