With variable returns beginning from Taken, the indisputably finest of the genre, Liam Neeson has become Hollywood’s go-to for grizzled revenge thrillers. While Cold Pursuit has been marketed as the next high-concept riff on an old classic – Liam Neeson kills people with a snowplow, the posters promise – the end result is something closer to Fargo than Taken, more dark comedy than dark night of the soul, though Neeson seems not to know it.Neeson stars as Nels Coxman, snowplow driver and citizen of the year in Kehoe, Colorado. When his son turns up dead of a heroin overdose, Nels senses a darker truth and sets out for revenge on the drug dealers who killed his boy, working his way to the Viking (Tom Bateman) at the top of the distribution ladder.
In my journey toward avoiding trailers altogether (I’ve worked my way up to ignoring the “final trailers,” often riddled with spoilers), I admit I never saw a promo for Cold Pursuit and only knew of its existence because of early posters that showed Liam Neeson dragging a body past a snowplow. “I’m in,” I said confidently, but now that I’ve come out of the theater, I’m not exactly sure what I had gotten into in the first place. Cold Pursuit is an odd movie with a meticulously tuned sense of what is funny, what is conventional, and what constitutes finality. “What the hell was that movie?” I asked when the credits rolled, and I genuinely don’t know what to make of it. I enjoyed it, certainly, and got a fair dose of thrills from Neeson’s ability to turn mundane vengeance into Shakespearean violence. But at the same time I felt myself being recalibrated over the course of the movie, aghast at an early gag about morgue equipment but gradually realizing that the whole film finds humor in offbeat interruptions, as in a gag of magnifying returns where the names of the deceased appear as title cards.
The film continues a surprising number of subplots, many of which overwhelm Neeson’s by the end of the film, and it’s in these side stories that the film stretches its dark comedic wings. When the film’s focus is on Nels Coxman and his drive for revenge, it’s a mostly straight action thriller; Liam finds a baddie, interrogates him with varying degrees of roughness, and executes him with brutal precision. Elsewhere in the film, though, mobsters struggle with fantasy football drafts, quarrel over who’s on body disposal duty, and take to the ski slopes because they were “born to fly.” One senses that Neeson was starring in one film – and perhaps the finest joke of all is that he is deadly serious in ways the rest of the film steadfastly refuses to be, that Neeson persisted in Taken form when the film called for Fargo.
Cold Pursuit is director Hans Petter Moland’s American debut, remaking his Norwegian film, and perhaps the Scandinavian sensibility that gave us The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (famously marketed as the “feel-bad Christmas movie” for American audiences) is to blame for this mad experiment in tonal shifts. It’s certainly not conventional American fare and can catch a moviegoer off-guard if they, like yours truly, enter a theater unaware. And yet, as a moviegoer increasingly aware of his own idiosyncratic sensibilities, there is something undeniably appealing about a director throwing caution to the wind and making a film that only he could have made. One could imagine a version of this film from the Taken crowd that would have been exactly what I expected, for better or for worse. So in that sense, Cold Pursuit earns my respect for giving me something I didn’t expect but ended up liking all the same.
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