Respond to these rapid questions in our Cold Pursuit quiz and we will tell you which Cold Pursuit character you are. Play it now.
In 2019, “Cold Pursuit” is the latest iteration of a recently established tradition: the late-winter revenge film starring Liam Neeson. One of his most bizarre and least predictable films in years, which is not the same as saying it is consistently good throughout the course of the film. Based on the Norwegian film “In Order of Disappearance,” and directed by the same director, Hans Petter Moland, the film is a fragmented, meandering tale in which Neeson’s character, a Kehoe, Colorado snowplow driver named Nels Coxman, gets a taste of vengeance and becomes a glutton after a heinous crime is committed against him. Some of the scenes are less convincing as standalone films and more like episodes of a television series that don’t quite add up the way you hoped they would when you watched them. It’s a shame that things aren’t going better. Whenever it’s at its best, it comes across as a wry critique of this unexpectedly lucrative period of Neeson’s career, as well as a borderline-slapstick spoof of the genre.
Nels (Liam Neeson) is presented with an award for being named Kehoe Citizen of the Year, and then the film jumps ahead to the murder of his only son Kyle (Michael Richardson, Neeson’s real-life son with the late Natasha Richardson), an airport baggage handler who is kidnapped and killed by members of a local drug cartel over a mishandled cocaine shipment. Kyle’s death was staged to appear as if he died of a heroin overdose, despite the fact that the young man did not use drugs. This was an added insult to the injury. Nels dispatches the men who were directly responsible for his son’s death, wraps their bodies in chicken wire, and dumps them off a waterfall so that their bodies will settle on the bottom of the Colorado River and be stripped clean by fish, a method of evidence disposal that he later claims he learned from reading crime fiction. Nels is dissatisfied with the executions he performs early on, and he resolves to work his way up the underworld’s hierarchy until he slays Trevor “Viking” Calcote, the ultimate boss of all bosses (Tom Bateman).
There are complications, and they aren’t always the ones you’d expect from someone who has seen other Liam Neeson revenge films before. Throughout the film, Moland and his American screenwriter, Frank Baldwin, play with Western film tropes, photographing the snow-covered mountains, valleys, and roads like panoramas from a John Ford cavalry film and imagining a Cowboys-and-Indians-style rivalry between the white-run drug cartel responsible for Kyle’s murder and a Southern Ute Indian gang that is mistakenly blamed for Nels’ retaliatory spree. Aside from that, there’s some commentary on how outlaws are obsessed with cliched symbols of respectability. As a result, Viking, a divorced yuppie clotheshorse and preening psychopath, treats Ryan (Nicholas Holmes), his own young son, like a pet or some kind of conditioning experiment, micromanaging his diet and recommending “Lord of the Flies” as a self-help manual, is primarily responsible for conveying this message.
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This American remake, like its source material, is comparatively light on graphic violence (the beatings are often uglier than the shootings), and it has the confidence to handle a significant amount of that business offscreen, staging significant killings behind drawn curtains or in the cut between one scene and the next, as is the case with the original. Nels’ ex-criminal brother Brock “Wingman” Coxman (William Forsyth), who got his nickname from the film “Top Gun,” a couple of Kehoe cops (Emily Rossum and John Doman) who are trying to make sense of the mayhem, and assorted mates and ex-girlfriends are also featured in the film, as well as Viking’s drug gang and his henchmen (including Domenick Lombardozzi In a few brief scenes, Laura Dern appears as Nels’ bereaved wife Grace, who abandons him almost immediately, perhaps sensing that her presence would be wasted in a film populated by sad, violent, and self-involved men.
Cold Pursuit Quiz
A dark comedy, “Cold Pursuit” is at least four-fifths of the way through and is filled with eccentric, often introverted, and depressing American archetypes throughout. Most of them would have been mesmerizing and/or hilarious if they had been fully fleshed out as characters, and if the film in which they were featured had been more elegantly structured and paced as a whole. It has a flatness to the characterizations, as well as an inability to introduce new faces or arrange meetings between established characters when the plot requires it, rather than much later in the story, when the audience is ready for the story to end and tends to view major new developments as narrative speed bumps, which is problematic.
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“Cold Pursuit,” even at its most navel-gazing and disorganized, contains elements you haven’t seen before, such as the tight-lipped hero who wonders how many words he’s required to speak at an awards dinner, the henchman who keeps losing at fantasy football because he’s too loyal to his favorite childhood teams and players, and the Ute crime boss who’s saddened by the appropriation of his people’s clothes and jewelry by white designers—and
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It’s possible that the film was destined to become a historical footnote regardless of its performance because it premiered only a few days after its star made one of the strangest, most clueless unforced errors in the history of movie promotion. During an interview, Neeson attempted to tie this film, as well as the futility of revenge in general, to a personal experience from his twenties, in which he responded to a white female friend’s rape by a black assailant by wandering around town with a crowbar, hoping to get into a fight with another “black bastard” and kill him, a story that was based on his own experience. Despite the fact that Neeson did not kill anyone or even fight them back then, he failed the modern-day personal disclosure-as-advertising test by failing to recognize that the racism part of his story—for which he did not apologize or even note and explain—was just as disturbing as the revenge part, which he condemned on the spot.
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To be sure, it’s exactly people like these that would’ve made good supporting players in “Cold Pursuit,” had the filmmakers been able to justify making room in an already overcrowded cast. Retribution is portrayed not only as a disturbing and self-destructive activity, but also as sad and bleakly comical throughout the film. The film opens with a printed quote from Oscar Wilde (“Some people bring happiness wherever they go, others bring happiness whenever they go”) that reads like a condemnation of people you haven’t met yet. Several of the main characters are driven by a desire for vengeance or revenge. Others are racist in a casual, if not murderous, manner. The fact that they are incapable of seeing their own flaws, and that their tribal myopia and obsessions with honor and vengeance are ways of distracting themselves from the bone-deep knowledge that they failed the very people whose bodies or memories they are hell-bent on defending, is abundantly clear to them.
For more personality quizzes check this: Overcomer Quiz.
