FILM OF THE WEEK
Cold Pursuit Cert: 16; Now showing
Given the furore over its lead’s remarks about revenge, many reviews of Cold Pursuit contain at least some relevant virtue signalling. I’m just going to run with the film however, which I saw before the remarks were made.
My expectations were not high but it proved to be a pleasant surprise, an often funny, noirish subversion of expectations that works on many levels.
When unassuming snowplough driver Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson) discovers that his son, Kyle (Neeson’s eldest son Michael Richardson) was murdered by local crime lord Viking (Tom Bateman), he sets about taking revenge. In so doing he unsettles a delicate peace between Viking’s crime gang and the local Native American one under White Bull (Tom Jackson) and it all gets messy in the beautiful snowy surroundings of Colorado. The local police are baffled at the body count in their normally quiet town and new officer Kim Dash (an underused Emmy Rossum) believes there is more to it than her chief chooses to believe.
Director Hans Petter Moland remakes his own Norwegian film from an English screenplay by Frank Baldwin and the overall effect is Taken goes Martin McDonagh via Fargo.
Without straying into parody, it plays with both Neeson’s revenge character stereotype and the genre. It is violent, stylised violence with death cards for each victim.
There are too few female characters and it’s a section too long — but it packs in quite a lot. Apart from the revenge, it gives us three fathers and their sons, the consequences of violence, plus it manages to flag social, racial, sexual and gender stereotypes, to mixed effect.
It’s a violence revenge film that would joke about how its tongue got so firmly in its cheek.
‘I saw the film before Liam Neeson’s now infamous remarks were made...’