REVIEW: ‘Cold Pursuit’ is a stranger mountain drive than you’d expect
Liam Neeson stars as Nels Coxman in Cold Pursuit, directed by Hans Petter Moland.
I’ve followed the production and release of Cold Pursuit – once known by the far better name Hard Powder – for a couple of years. First there was the news that the movie was getting kicked out of one of its Canadian shooting locations over worries about its depiction of Indigenous people. Then there was a trailer that clearly took inspiration from the John Wick movies – with neon lights galore and a grizzled revenge story that suits its star, Liam Neeson.
But what we get in the movie is not at all what was suggested by the early production reports or the marketing – instead, it’s a thoroughly odd experience, a tonal mix that didn’t quite work for me, but something that definitely sets itself apart from the dime-a-dozen thrillers Neeson has made consistently for the past ten years. It’s the kind of movie that features a sequence where a gangster (Tom Jackson) ventures out onto a ski hill to wave his arms happily as skiers go by, only to suddenly scream with grief, while his crew has a snowball fight and goes paragliding (??) nearby. I can’t earnestly recommend it, but neither am I sorry that it exists.
Neeson stars as Nels Coxman, a veteran snow plow driver in the small Colorado town of Kehoe. Coxman is a genial, selfless sort, and as the film begins, Coxman is awarded the Citizen of the Year honour. But his victory is cut short when he finds out his son has been found dead of an apparent heroin overdose. Coxman refuses to believe his son was addicted to drugs, and instead sets off on a quest to find out who might have killed his son and covered it up. Along the way, he crosses paths with the criminal underbelly of Kehoe and nearby Denver, eventually coming to blows with a kingpin nicknamed Viking (Tom Bateman).
Tom Jackson as White Bull.
It’s perhaps most accurate to describe the film as a thriller-comedy, because it oscillates so wildly between those tones. At one moment a dead character is solemnly carried in a casket towards a waiting truck, and then the movie pauses to poke fun at how long it takes the cargo hoist on the truck to complete its job. These jokes don’t always land with the kind of humorous punch they should, but they also don’t get annoying, so your mileage may vary. In this way, it’s similar to Guy Ritchie’s earlier work, albeit with a more drawn-out, Nordic pace.
And that Nordic flavour is deserved, as Cold Pursuit is the English-language remake of a 2014 Norwegian film by the same director, Hans Petter Moland. Perhaps the funniest holdover from the original film is the adaptation of the dick joke in the protagonist’s name: Nels Coxman in Cold Pursuit is Nils Dickman in In Order of Disappearance, played by Stellan Skarsgård. Having not seen the original, I can’t confirm which is Moland’s better work, but my curiosity is sufficiently piqued to track it down.
I sometimes feel like I say this too often in the era of peak TV, but Cold Pursuit might have worked a lot better as a limited series of 6 or 8 episodes. The movie packs so many interesting threads into the film that it only half-explores, like the buddy-cop relationship between the local police (an idealistic Emmy Rossum and a soft-hearted John Doman), the villain’s secretly gay bodyguards, or the Indigenous crime family headed by Tom Jackson’s character, White Bull. In many ways, the movie reminds me of the second season of FX’s Fargo anthology show, especially with the connections running between the local gangs, the polished organized crime organization, and the bantering cops chasing them down. Imagine a series that had all those things plus Neeson’s character as a Walter White-style “good man on a downward spiral” – instant hit.
Emmy Rossum as Kim Dash.
But that’s not what we get. There’s far too many balls in the air during the two-hour film, and Moland can’t pull off many tricks with them. We get very little insight into Coxman’s thinking other than his rage, and most of the jokes in the film happen without Neeson around, in scenes centred on the criminals – a shame, since Neeson can be quite funny when he wants to be. It’s also unclear how the film wants us to feel about Coxman’s vigilante justice. Are we supposed to cheer him on, laugh, or be somewhat spooked by him? Sometimes Coxman’s brutality seems to come from nowhere, and it’s hard to laugh when it’s obvious the bad guy is already down.
Cold Pursuit isn’t the kind of movie you should rush out to see, but it is comfortably in the mushy middle of movies that are worth a look if they pop up on your favourite streaming service, or maybe as part of a Neeson double bill at a neighbourhood theatre. I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like in a different format; as long as Moland is re-adapting his own work, maybe he should strike while the iron is hot?
Cold Pursuit gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Laura Dern is wasted in this movie – she’s written out before she has a chance to do anything related to the main plot.
We needed more snow plow action. I wanted to see Neeson drive one right into the villain’s house, or maybe careen out of a snow bank and into a bunch of thugs.
I kind of wanted some poetic justice related to the villain’s obsession over his diet.