It wouldn’t be stretching the limits of believability even in the slightest to suggest that in terms of the names involved and the way critics and audiences greeted the end product, The Snowman is unquestionably one of the worst movies to emerge in the last decade based solely on its talent-to-quality ratio.
Serial killer thrillers are almost always a home run, so the potential of seeing such a star-studded assemblage of creatives banding together to craft an atmospheric and snow-capped story that sees a dogged detective drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with a murderer who continues taunting his adversary as the bodies pile up was through the roof.
Remember, we’re talking about an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Jo Nesbø – who saw his Headhunters turned into a mini masterpiece – with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Let the Right One in director Thomas Alfredson helming a screenplay authored by BAFTA-winning scriber Peter Straughan and Academy Award-nominated writer Hossein Amini, which was edited by three-time Oscar-winning legend and longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker.
Then there’s the cast, which saw Michael Fassbender play the lead with support from the likes of Rebecca Ferguson, J.K. Simmons, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Chloë Sevigny, and Val Kilmer. Somehow, though, The Snowman was awful. Not just disappointing, but flat-out terrible, as a six percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 18 percent user rating can attest.
Of course, it’s still a serial killer thriller at the end of the day, so it was inevitable that The Snowman would find itself back in the streaming charts eventually, with Prime Video subscribers the bold subset to subject themselves to a misfire of quite frankly jaw-dropping proportions this week, per FlixPatrol.
