The Middle Man

Directed by Bent Hamer, The Middle Man follows Pål Sverre Hagen’s unemployed Frank Farrelli as he lands a job breaking bad news to his small community’s quirky citizens. It’s an unabashedly irreverent premise that’s employed to mostly underwhelming effect by Hamer, as the filmmaker, armed with his own script, delivers a relentlessly off-kilter drama that contains few attributes designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by an exceedingly, excessively deliberate pace. And although Hamer has elicited strong work from his various performers, with the movie certainly benefiting from the compelling efforts of folks like Paul Gross, Tuva Novotny, and Kenneth Welsh, The Middle Man boasts an assortment of uniformly (and egregiously) oddball characters that remain, for the most part, impossible to connect to or wholeheartedly sympathize with (ie they’re all just so deadpan and weird). There is, as such, never a point at which one is wholeheartedly drawn into the less-than-spellbinding proceedings, which is a shame, certainly, given that the narrative has been suffused with a handful of admittedly compelling sequences (eg Frank’s ongoing encounters with an antagonistic local, etc). By the time the eventful yet predictably underwhelming finale rolls around, The Middle Man has cemented its place as a disappointing misfire that’s hardly in the same league as Hamer’s previous picture, 2014’s superb 1001 Grams.

** out of ****