The trailer for Mads Mikkelsen's Polar is about as John Wick as it gets
It sure didn’t take long for “John Wick” to become a genre, huh? Atomic Blonde was cool enough to stand on its own and Hotel Artemis twisted the premise slightly by taking inspiration from John Wick’s assassin hotel rather than the man himself, but this trailer for Netflix’s Polar is so John Wick that it’s not hard to imagine a tattoo-covered Russian mobster watching this and hissing to some poor underling about how stupid it was to rip off the Baba Yaga this brazenly. That’s not to say Polar looks bad, though, because it does star Mads Mikkelsen and he’s definitely awesome enough to carry a John Wick-style movie about a former assassin who gets dragged back into the stylish murder game when some idiots try to kill him. Polar even gives Mikkelsen his own Baba Yaga-style nom de murder, with everyone in the assassin community calling him “The Black Kaiser.” But hey, Polar also has a young person played by Vanessa Hudgens who befriends The Black Kaiser, which is something John Wick has never done. Take that, Keanu!
Polar is based on a webcomic that predates John Wick, so it’s definitely not a rip-off, but there’s no chance that someone wasn’t thinking about New York’s most famous dog owner when they put this trailer together. Anyway, Polar will hit Netflix on January 25.