It’s truly a shame that the terrible stuff Liam Neeson said in that interview will ultimately overshadow Cold Pursuit because it’s a really good movie, far from the junkier action fare that you would usually get this time of year, and one of the best of its kind in a while. The film, which is written by Frank Baldwin and directed by Hans Petter Moland, is a remake of the 2014 Norwegian film, In Order Of Disappearance, which Molland also directed.
It follows Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson), a snow plow driver who lives a quiet life in a small resort town in the Rocky Mountains. One day, he is called in by the authorities, and he sees the body of his son, who apparently overdosed. However, he soon finds out that his son was actually murdered, and is now seeking to avenge his death by going after a big drug lord.
Based on that premise, you might form an idea on where a story like this would go, but the filmmakers have something far more strange and idiosyncratic in mind. The film barely offers the violent catharsis that many moviegoers might expect. Nels spends much of the first half taking out low level guys from the gang responsible for his son’s death, and even those are treated as nasty and exhausting affairs.
The film also spends a lot of time away from Nels, giving a surprising amount of screen time to the villains, mainly Viking (Tom Bateman), a Denver based drug lord. He’s a deeply eccentric figure that Bateman goes full ham with. We see him trying to control everything about what his young son does and consumes, much to his ex-wife, Aya’s (Julia Jones) annoyance. Later in the film, we also meet a separate gang, made up on entirely Native Americans – except for the one legit Indian guy, which is an amusing gag – led by White Bull (Tom Jackson). A misunderstanding leads to a conflict between the two gangs, and there’s a lot of time spent on each group and the dynamics between certain members, and how consequences of certain decisions come into play as the movie goes along.
The humor starts off fairly dry, with light musings and very, very European deadpan quirkiness. As the simple plan is met with complications, the humor also cranks up. There are some subversive reveals, amusing death scenes, extended bits of comedic interplay, and twists on revenge tropes. The clever thing about the way the humor is implemented is that it’s hardly telegraphed. You don’t know going into a scene, if it will veer into a comedic direction or a serious one, and as a result, it adds a layer of suspense to pretty much every moment in the film.
There are a few things that don’t fully work. Every now and then, the film will cut to detectives, Kim (Emmy Rossum) and Gip (John Doman). There’s an interesting dynamic between the two, with Kim eager to investigate the disappearances of gangsters while Gip, being on the job far longer, simply wants to let things run their course and not get involved. However, despite a few interactions with Nels, they don’t really contribute anything to the story as a whole. And I was not even sure if their uselessness was the point. The women in general are pretty shortchanged here, which is unfortunate. Laura Dern is in it as Nel’s wife for maybe five minutes, and with a handful of lines. The only things we know about Aya are all in relation to her relationship with Viking, and the fact that she’s a Native American doesn’t seem to affect anything or even get brought up except for one line. Nel’s brother, Brock (William Forsythe), is shown to be married with a constantly scowling Asian wife (Elizabeth Thai), and with the way she was used in the film, she might as well have been a slightly aggressive dog.
So, there are definitely a few things that keep Cold Pursuit from being perfect, but much of it were things that came to mind after the fact. It’s a highly entertaining and smartly constructed dark comedy with bits of emotional truth, and genre playfulness that elevates it above many films of its type. Doing a dark comedy is already a hard thing to pull off, but the filmmakers managed to be careful in how they played with tone while making it feel effortless. The performances are top notch, the action is solid, and there are a number of gags that are still making me giggle long after seeing the film. It does make me curious to check out the original film, but unlike another recent remake of an acclaimed foreign film, this one is pretty great.