Cold Pursuit (2018) [Blu-ray]
Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: Revenge is best served cold.

Cold Pursuit, an action thriller infused with irreverent humor, stars Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman, a family man whose quiet life with his wife (Laura Dern) is upended following the mysterious death of their son. Nels' search for justice turns into a vengeful hunt for Viking (Tom Bateman), a drug lord he believes is connected to the death. As one by one of Viking's associates "disappear," Nels goes from upstanding citizen to ice-cold vigilante, letting nothing -- and no one -- get in his way.

Storyline: Quiet family man and hard-working snowplow driver Nels is the lifeblood of a glitzy resort town in the Rocky Mountains because he is the one who keeps the winter roads clear. He and his wife live in a comfortable cabin away from the tourists. The town has just awarded him "Citizen of the Year." But Nels has to leave his quiet mountain life when his son is murdered by a powerful drug lord. As a man who has nothing to lose he is stoked by a drive for vengeance. This unlikely hero uses his hunting skills and transforms from an ordinary man into a skilled killer as he sets out to dismantle the cartel. Nels' actions ignite a turf war between a manically unpredictable gangster known as Viking and a rival gang boss. Justice is served in one final spectacular confrontation that will leave (almost) no one unscathed.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 13, 2019 Note to aspiring actors: if your casting agent approaches you with a role playing a family member of a character slated to be played by Liam Neeson, you might want to read the entire screenplay first, just to see what may happen to your character and/or to discern how long you're actually going to be in the film. As was perhaps most memorably exemplified by the Taken 3-Movie Collection, characters related to a character played by Neeson don't always tend to fare very well, and that's once again the case with regard to Cold Pursuit, a kind of cheekily humorous take on the kind of action adventure revenge thriller that Neeson has become so closely associated with. Cold Pursuit is an Americanized remake of In Order of Disappearance, a film which posited Stellan Skarsgård as a character named Nils Dickman. In perhaps just one sign of how cheeky Frank Baldwin's screenplay can be, the character is now named Nels Coxman, but other outlines of the story are pretty much the same in both formulations. Coxman is a snowplow driver in the fictional town of Kehoe, supposedly near Denver, keeping a vital link passable and earning him a Citizen of the Year Award. His seemingly happy life with wife Grace (Laura Dern) and son Kyle (Micheal Richardson) is sent into chaos when Kyle turns up dead, apparently from a heroin overdose. (One "relative" down — aspiring actors may want to stay tuned.) Coxman is suspicious, as he's certain Kyle didn't have a drug problem, and while Coxman doesn't really have a "particular set of skills", once he finds out the truth behind his son's death, he erupts into a fury of vengeance, taking out a series of people involved in his son's death, something which kind of improbably ignites what amounts to a gang war in the snowy climes of an isolated wintry community.

The problem with so-called "black" or "dark" comedy tends to be tone, and though Cold Pursuit ports over the original version's director, unfortunately Hans Petter Moland doesn't always seem to know how to "translate" his vision into the confines (maybe even strictures) of a big budget Hollywood affair with major stars. In Order of Disappearance managed to more carefully navigate the arguably "impassable" route of this story, keeping a deliberately off kilter subtext more properly compartmentalized. Here, the comedy kind of bubbles up occasionally, but the darkness seems more forced, and therefore more artificial feeling.

The darkness extends to both of the Coxman parents' inability to deal with their son's demise. Grace pretty much goes haywire, and is in fact one of the first in the film to "disappear" (the film utilizes the original's title for a rather, yes, cheeky final credits roll where all of the actors' names vanish, "in order of disappearance"). Coxman himself seems ready to commit suicide, until a confession from one of Kyle's friends alerts Coxman to a nefarious drug dealing operation in this wild land run by a bad guy named Viking (Tom Bateman). Coxman of course decides to hunt down Viking in an act of retribution for what amounts to Coxman's son's murder. As should be expected (at least for fans of the Taken franchise), Coxman has to wend his way through a series of interstitial characters, and you can pretty much guess what happens to all of them. Unfortunately, Viking is (initially) unaware of Coxman's pursuit and instead mistakenly believes that the deaths of his henchmen are attributable to another drug dealer named White Bull (Tom Jackson), which leads to that aforementioned gang war.

It's obvious that Moland is going for a kind of Coen-esque Fargo sort of sensibility, but the film never attains the giddy heights of the earlier entry, and in fact it is too overstuffed with dead ends and subplots, including what is kind of ironically a kidnapping aspect, with Coxman as the abductor, in what might be seen as the "flip side" to the Taken films. There are bits here that work rather well, but the entire film seems like an uncertain balancing act between more straightforward action elements and kind of fitful stabs at pitch black humor. An interesting cast is arguably under utilized here, including the two putative female stars, Laura Dern and Emmy Rossum (as the local "Marge Gunderson" of this story).

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf was even less enthused about Cold Pursuit than I am. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

Cold Pursuit might have worked at least a little better if some of the overstuffed plot dynamics had been pared down, and also arguably if the film had really had the courage to go for its gonzo comedic proclivities more fully. Neeson is kind of weirdly engaging in this role that more or less makes fun of some of what has become his screen persona, but the film never quite manages to balance itself artfully between black humor and more aggressive action adventure elements. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.

[CSW] -2.8- This is typical Liam Neeson fare in revenge mode. However, you should be aware that this is a remake of the 2014 Norwegian movie,In Order of Disappearance, which is available on Netflix streaming. I have now seen both and… it is almost exactly the same movie. Of course, Neeson is much more believable in this role than Stellan Skarsgard was in the original one. I suppose they just had to redo this one with Neeson to give it the credibility it needs to justify all the bloodshed. If you are a Neeson fan, then you can't miss this one. Amazing he can carry out all the physical fighting at his age.
[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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