Cold Pursuit review: Liam Neeson’s revenge is a dish served again and again

Matthew Norman22 February 2019

It is a relief that enough has already been written about Liam Neeson’s candid approach to publicising his latest Hollywood outing. I can’t think of anything to match co-star Tom Bateman’s commentary at the time.

Bateman contributed two words to the joint interview with The Independent earlier this month, in which Neeson memorably reflected on the instinct for revenge. If anyone missed it, which feels unlikely, Neeson confided that when he was young a close friend told him she had been raped and his first reaction was to ask about the rapist’s ethnicity.

Given the answer, he spent the next week or so traipsing the streets with a cosh, in the hope that a “black b******” (he did put the phrase in air quotes) would attack him and give him cause to batter him to death. “Holy s***,” said Bateman, which seems to say it all.

Although Neeson said he was ashamed of the incident and denied being a racist, he tested the elasticity of the axiom “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” while plugging yet another movie in which he seeks to avenge a heinous crime done to someone he loves.

Face-off: main, Tom Bateman as Trevor “Viking” Calcote and Liam Neeson as Nels

This may come as news to less antiquated readers but there was a time when he was both a serious dramatic actor and relatively safe pair of hands. He managed to publicise Schindler’s List without reference to hunting down random pedestrians in lederhosen.

Then in 2008 came Taken. He gave that speech and was reborn as an action hero. In his mid-fifties he became cinema’s go-to guy for grieving vigilantism.

With the two Taken sequels and a cascade of other derivative revengers (Unknown, Non-Stop, The Commuter, etc) he has done little else on screen than look for, find and kill miscreants ever since. Although he’s up to his old tricks in Cold Pursuit, this is not the formulaic dross that fans of his latter oeuvre might expect. This is a studiedly cynical, darkly droll, semi-parodic bloodfest that might have been a minor classic had the editing been as clinically brutal as Neeson’s character.

Remade from his own original by director Hans Petter Moland, it transposes the story from Norway to the Rocky Mountain ski-resort town of Kehoe, Colorado. Although Neeson’s Nels Coxman makes his living by clearing roads with his snowplough (a vehicle with clear potential for use as a makeshift cosh), at the heart of the plot is another type of white powder.

Nels is an upright, reticent type. He struggles with his speech when accepting the tiny town’s award for Citizen of the Year. His home life in a picturesque log cabin with arty wife Grace (Laura Dern, lending her usual elegance to a brief appearance) is idyllic.

Then their son dies in what at first looks like a heroin overdose but soon transpires to have been murder by a drone working for Bateman’s Trevor Calcote, aka Viking, the main man of Rocky Mountain cocaine dealers.
What follows is a hybrid of early

The biggest films arriving in 2019

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Tarantino and the Coen brothers’ Minnesota-set noir masterpiece, Fargo. The drugginess, sharply flippant wit and amusingly stylised language (scripted by Frank Baldwin) are in homage to the former. The snowily isolated small-town setting, and the resemblance of a smart woman cop to Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, pay tribute to the latter.

For an hour, as Nels wastes henchmen en route to tracking down Trevor, it works beautifully. Underplaying the grief, if not ignoring it, Neeson adds wry detachment to that well practised turn as the Northern Irish Nemesis.

Bateman brings the ideal level of cultivated sociopathy to Trevor as he alternates between the dealing of coke and death (he sparks a drug war by inadvertently icing the son of Native American rival White Bull), and obsessing about his precocious small son’s diet, to the fury of a literally ball-breaking wife.

If the endless, vicious cycle of fathers avenging sons is a theme, the film avoids any hint of a dismal, sub-Greek tragedy aura. It declares its comic intent from the start with the plinky-plonky strings and piano opening bars (echoing the Kill Bill score) of a soundtrack that underscores the zesty Scandi flavour with a snatch of Barbie Girl.

Life in plastic may be fantastic, as the Norwegian Lene from Aqua insisted. Death in it seems less so as Nels thoughtfully wraps a trio of deserving victims in plastic sheets before tipping them over the mountainside.

After a zingy, tight first hour, the concision gives way to flab. The executions become a touch mechanical, the gags start to feel forced, and the avalanche of lavishly nicknamed baddies loses distinction. Neeson, although miles the best thing on screen, vanishes for achingly long periods as the film slaloms between intricate subplots.

Eventually, the pace and wit return along with Nels (“Have you heard of Stockholm syndrome?” he is charmingly asked by an eight-year-old kidnap victim). The climax compensates in comforting inevitability for what it lacks in visceral shock value. No one hires Liam Neeson for a movie like this — even one with a tone that defies genre convention — to leave matters tantalisingly unresolved.

Whether anyone will hire him again after that interview is anyone’s guess. But if one judges from the Mel Gibson decade-in-the-wilderness template, the old fella will be 76 when he’s done his time and ready for one of those geriatric bucket-list ensemble tweefests in which the only vengeance is visited on anyone dumb enough to buy a ticket in the first place.

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