Cold Pursuit

Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, and Emmy Rossum  

Director: Hans Petter Moland

118 minutes (15) 2019

Studio Canal 4K Ultra HD

[Released 24th June]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Steven Hampton

Revenge thriller Cold Pursuit is the US remake of a Norwegian movie, In Order Of Disappearance (aka: Kraftidioten, 2014), by the same director, Hans Petter Moland. This story is set, mostly, in the frozen ski-resort of Kehoe in the Rocky Mountains, where the town’s citizen-of-year award goes to snow-plough driver Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson). Amusingly, Stellan Skarsgard played Nils Dickman in the original, and rude jokes about his last name are seemingly inevitable. Nels is happily married to Grace (Laura Dern) until their son Kyle is killed by a gangster. Soon, Nels becomes a serial killer, bumping off anyone linked to a drug-smuggling cartel. With a distinctly tongue-in-cheek formula to this movie’s episodic vigilantism, much black comedy ensues during the campaign of violent slaughter. William Forsythe is very good as Nels’ stoic brother Brock. 

The villains have nicknames like Speedo, Limbo, and Santa. Their comically vegan boss is known as Viking. An odd mix of natives in a rival gang only results in the recycling of an old joke about indians needing a ‘reservation’ at a hotel. These quirky characters and more are often seen isolated against magnificent wintry landscapes, adding tremendously visual appeal to events, including the chaotic finale’s all-guns-blazing shoot-out. Unlike a predominantly male cast in the original Kraftidioten, this superior US remake has Emmy Rossum, outstanding as local cop Kim Dash, investigating the spate of disappearances, and the mobster’s ex-wife also proves to be a formidable protagonist, quite unsympathetic to his routine mistakes or his crooked empire’s collapse, and wholly intolerant of any nonsense from an utterly selfish man who's troubled by emotional detachment from society or family-related reality. 

“I thought you were a kidnapper.”

“Not all the time.”

Unlike the Taken movies, Neeson’s character has no special skill-set, he’s just a bereaved father who wants to know the grisly truth about his son’s murder. Full of a suicidal anger, he soon turns nasty against callous villains that poisoned his innocent son. A stony-faced approach to jokes means that deadpan humour is effective far beyond the outright gags of similarly-themed movies, whether they are obviously Tarantino-styled, or not. This extends to the character of a hit-man, nicknamed the Eskimo (played without irony by a black actor). In the action that prompts a gang-war between rivals that destroys a whole regional cartel, many ingeniously written scenes, even when cast with genre stereotypes, still acknowledge how a poetic use of confused realism can be surprising and fascinating.

This remake is only slightly longer than the original movie, but its humour is notably a bit sharper, and blessed with enhanced jokes, so there’s a sense that every new opportunity was taken to refine the original’s screenplay in a translation with fresher lines, and more nuanced characters, especially the feminist ones. Looking superb in this 4K UHD edition, Cold Pursuit should, and deserves to, reach a wider audience than Kraftidioten did, and that’s a very good thing for this type of entertaining crime movie.