Last year, I kicked off my 2018 review catalogue with an unsurprising pan of Liam Neeson-vehicle The Commuter. My less-than-enthusiastic feelings about the last decade of Neeson’s work can be see there. As I entered 2019 and began looking ahead for first-quarter topics to write about, Neeson’s new film, Cold Pursuit, caught my eye.
I thought, maybe I ought to make an annual tradition of subjecting myself to a Liam Neeson film in January or February (months commonly used as dumping grounds for all of studios’ cheap, lazy, and expectedly non-lucrative films), as long as he’s making them; I could always throw in a retro-review if he opts not to. So I took the review for Cold Pursuit, out this weekend, and settled in for a cozily bland and familiar Neeson experience.
I did not get what I expected. Cold Pursuit is a strange and strangely good film; the kind of good that I can’t quite do justice in written description, and that I can’t recommend to very many people. But it worked, at least in parts, for me.
Cold Pursuit is ultimately a black comedy, though it’s milder on the black and drier on the comedy than most in the genre I’ve seen. If that sounds incredibly boring and unsatisfying, I can understand why, and I think many would find the film to be so. But it creates a uniquely, casually detached tone throughout the film—a tone that took me almost a third of the runtime to understand instead of erroneously dismissing it as poor filmmaking.
The story is one of revenge. Nels Coxman (Neeson) is a snowplow operator in the fictional Kehoe, Colorado, a ski town a few hours up the mountains from Denver. At the start of the film, Nels is given the Kehoe Citizen of the Year award, an honor that he humbly professes should be given to someone who does more important work than clearing roads through mountain passes on a daily basis. Shortly thereafter, Coxman’s son is kidnapped and murdered by gangsters.
If that seems sudden and unceremonious, that is because that’s exactly how the film handles it. The following scene, in which Coxman and his wife Grace (played briefly by Laura Dern) go to identify their son at the morgue, opts for borderline-Napoleon Dynamite-levels of awkward, quiet humor, rather than sobering melodrama—a decision which is jarring but nonetheless interesting, and keys the viewer in to just how cold this film is going to be.
Coxman decides to find the men responsible and kill them, working his way up the chain of organized crime from the dealers at the bottom. How he never attracts more attention than he does, firing guns and causing ruckuses in a number of public places, is a question the film has little interest in, but the confrontation scenes are fun every time. Neeson’s trademark conviction is juxtaposed against Coxman’s awkward nice-guy veneer as he inefficiently interrogates his targets, before ungracefully killing them. It makes for an unusual brand of amusing comedy as Coxman learns to overcome—or, rather, put to use—his mild manner in favor of bloody justice.
Coxman’s wife leaves him, presumably out of frustration over his days of being out late (secretly murdering people) and barely showing his grief over his son at home. This frees Coxman to hunt more liberally, learning more and more about the web of organized crime he’s discovered, and he decides to bring the entire operation down. Of course, gang boss Trevor “Viking” Calcote (played with deliciously hammy despicability by Tom Bateman) begins to pick up on the fact that his employees are disappearing in quick succession, and goes to work trying to track down the man responsible.
When reading a plot summary, Cold Pursuit sounds like an unsurprising crime thriller for Neeson. In essence, it’s an approximation of the same formula behind Taken, the franchise that spawned this decade-plus of crappy Neeson-led action movies. But first-time Hollywood director Hans Petter Moland, remaking his own Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, brings a bitterly funny flavor to the story, not only in the performances and dialogue, but visually as well. Cinematographer Philip Øgaard frames the story with broad, bleak images of the cold winter mountainside, and Moland positions his characters in strange, sometimes unproductive ways in order to add a dry sense of visual comedy.
Coxman laughs and jokes alongside his victims at the futility of his endeavor to bring down an entire crime syndicate, then goes through with the murders anyway. Perhaps the funniest visual in the film is early on, when an interrupted suicide attempt results in lips getting stuck to the cold metal of a gun barrel. It’s a small moment, but Cold Pursuit is full of those, all of which might be mistaken as unintentional if not for the film’s consistent deliberation to scatter them throughout every scene.
Perhaps the most confusing, and at times frustrating thing about Cold Pursuit is its editing. Scenes will cut seemingly at random, in the middle of sudden character movements or just when you think something else is about to happen in the scene. It grants the film a fairly brisk pace, and perhaps adds to the sense of detachment and nihilistic disinterest by cutting away without warning or resolve, but it does seem at times to be accidental or at least unaware of itself. Perhaps Moland’s style is just fresh enough, and I unacquainted enough with it, that it will take some getting used to in his later work.
Not every instance of glossing over genuine emotion in the name of dispassionate comedy works, either because the film could really stand to have some real emotion to grab on to, or because the joke itself falls flat. But for the most part, the comedy is consistently offbeat, off-key, and off-putting enough to be refreshing, even if sometimes hard to read. It’s not the most graceful execution of dark comedy put to screen, but it is at least a unique one.
As I noted earlier, it’s hard to recommend this to people. If you like Liam Neeson, as I do, but are sick of his recent work, this might be amusing and weird enough to be worth checking out. If you like black comedy, I say go for it. That said, this isn’t a movie I feel entirely justified in making broad recommendations of “If, then” about. I’d be much more comfortable recommending this to people I know personally, so that I know what makes them tick and how this might or might not tickle them. I suppose it’s in the vein of Yorgos Lanthimos, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Martin McDonagh, more than anything else, though it’s an uneven and deliberately watery distillation of them. More than anything, it makes me excited for more work from Moland; he may very well become a new name in American black comedy.