It’s February and that means Liam Neeson is back to beat everyone up (but do we want him back? That’s a question for another day). This iteration finds himself plowing snow in a Denver suburb….and falling into the world of cocaine smuggling and a rival gang turf war. Ya know, like all those other snow plowers out there, right?
You know Liam Neeson’s character is an alpha male, because his name is Nels Coxman, recently crowned resident of the year in Kehoe Colorado. Husband to Grace (Laura Dern), father to…what happens to become a son with a drug overdose. However, Nels is one step ahead, realizes his son isn’t a druggie, and gets information about the gang leading to their CEO Viking (Tom Bateman), who in turn is at war with White Bull (Tom Jackson) and his Native American drug smugglers.
If you’re Liam Neeson, you’re probably worried about people blending your dark morose stories together, so that no one really knows what you’re in. However, you still are constrained by a studio system, meaning you have to make more of these to get the big paycheck you want. So what do you do? You pick a story that completely undercuts any bit of its morose storytelling with part of a scene that’s knowingly winking at the audience. Cold Pursuit starts with Nels’s son dying of a heroin overdose. Pretty Bleak Right? But then you start to notice little codas on scenes. Two thugs in one of the gangs that are gay and in love with each other. A funeral ends with a body SLOWLY pushed into a hearse. A dead body being handled by…a receptionist. You think these are the big ones? The movie’s just getting started. Cold Pursuit builds these little codas into each scene that by the hour mark, the movie basically becomes a comedy of how crazy this story is going to get, while keeping tally of how many people are dying. The script does no service to the actual plot, treating it more like an exercise in something you can condescend to, but it certainly throws a curveball into a Neeson action movie where he does the stuff you want him to do.
Cold Pursuit builds to an amazing eff you to its story in its final death that you’ll be laughing as you exit the theater. Check that, you’ll be laughing while everyone around you is shushing you, because they watched a Liam Neeson revenge thriller where a kid gets kidnapped and Native Americans wax poetically about what was taken from them. I guess both are right, but you’ll have more fun if you go in with a little humor and a bonkers imagination.