Forget the row, this is Neeson at his best
COLD PURSUIT
(15, 119 mins)
Hans Petter Moland
Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, Tom Bateman
Director: Stars: CAPERNAUM
(15, 126 mins)
Nadine Labaki
Zain Al Rafeea, Yordanos Shiferaw, Kawsar Al Haddad, Fadi Yousef
Director: Stars: ON THE BASIS OF SEX
(12A, 120 mins)
Mimi Leder
Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Kathy Bates
Director: Stars:
EPursuit Cold
VERYONE who worked on is astonishingly talented. The cast are now best friends for life. The director knew exactly what he wanted. Funny things happened on set. It’s a great film.
These are just a few of the things Liam Neeson didn’t say at press junket for his latest revenge thriller.
Instead of ticking off the usual publicistapproved platitudes, Neeson, 66, launched into an unbelievable anecdote about how he once planned to murder a random black man after an unnamed friend was raped in a unnamed place at a unspecified time.
Neeson has since apologised for any offence caused, denied he is racist and added a few details. Whether that puts you off seeing his latest revenge thriller is up to you. But I can’t help feeling sorry for Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.
This is his first Hollywood movie and it’s an unexpected hoot. Moland has upped the humour in this remake of his Nordic noir film In Order Of Disappearance and rejigged the plot to play on his leading man’s movie star persona.
Since making the switch to action movies as a grizzled CIA agent in the Taken movies, we’ve seen him him as a grizzled air marshall in Non-Stop (Taken On A Plane) and a grizzled cop in The Commuter (Taken On A Train).
On paper, Neeson playing a revengeseeking snowplough driver sounds like Taken On Ice. But under Moland, the
Neeson vehicle takes some unexpected turns. There are salty one-liners, gleefully over-the-top mobsters, and splashes of inky black humour.
Moland’s role models seem to be Quentin Tarantino and the Coen and McDonagh brothers. He’s not quite there yet, but if you enjoyed Reservoir Dogs, Fargo or In Bruges you should have a fine time with this.
We meet Neeson’s grizzled driver Nels Coxman as he’s accepting the Citizen Of The Year award for his tireless devotion to the economy of the Colorado ski town of Kehoe. His happiness is suddenly shattered when his airport baggage handler son Kyle (played by Neeson’s actual son Micheál Richardson), is found dead from a heroin overdose.
“We don’t know our son,” cries his wife Grace (Laura Dern). “He was no druggie!” roars Nels.
As we’ve already seen Kyle pumped with drugs and murdered by narco-smuggling mobsters, we know what will happen next. The mild-mannered Nels will transform into a one-man killing machine and turn the snow-covered town red.
If you’ve seen Neeson’s cameo in Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short you’ll know that the not-racist star has a talent for deadpan comedy.
And there are plenty of dark laughs as he goes about his business of murdering his way up the mob’s chain of command, rolling the bodies in chicken wire and dumping them off an icy cliff.
Why? Because it makes the fish eat the flesh and the corpses sink. Nels is a fan of grisly crime novels.
A running gag throughout is that each character’s death and their increasingly ludicrous mob nickname is memorialised on the screen in black and white.
The big villain is called Viking (a very funny Tom Bateman), an unlikely name for a health-food loving germaphobe in a designer suit.
As Nels’s killing spree sparks a mob war with a Native American gang, we meet more quirky characters – the gay henchmen who keeps losing at fantasy football because he’s too loyal to his own team, the lazy Kehoe cop, the hitman with the confused code…
Not all the jokes land and at times the pace begins to sag under the weight of its subplots. But this is a rare Neeson action movie – witty, funny and, for once, deliberately preposterous.
Are you staying up for the Oscars? Have you made your predictions for Best Picture, Most Cringeworthy Speech and Most Ridiculous Dress?
If you’re thinking of taking a informed bet on Best Foreign Language Film, you’ve only got a few hours to catch
“Why do you want to sue your parents?” a judge asks an angelic-looking 12-year-old called Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) at the beginning of the Lebanese outsider. “Because I was born,” he replies.
After laying out her ingenious premise, director Nadine Labaki takes us out of the courtroom and into the slums of Beirut. We begin with Zain surrounded by countless sisters and brothers in a squalid flat. While the kids scam drugs from pharmacists, the parents (Kawsar Al Haddad and Fadi
Yousef) sit around smoking, moaning and recklessly reproducing. To his mother, creating miserable lives is the work of God.
When Zain’s 11-year-old sister is sold to a corner shop owner for a few chickens, Zain runs away from home.
I would have appreciated some resolution to the court case but it delivers powerful arguments about the importance of social care, contraception and reading more than one book.
Mind you, it might not put you in the mood for a glitzy awards ceremony.
We spend a lot more time in the courtroom in a traditional but suitably rousing true story about a ground-breaking legal case that helped outlaw sexual discrimination in the American workplace.
Our heroine is Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones), the current US Supreme Court Justice.
As one of nine women in a class of 500 in 1956, she is asked to justify taking the place of a “Harvard Man”, the first of many indignities.
When her husband Marty (Armie Hammer), also a Harvard law student, is diagnosed with cancer, Ruth doubles up on her work and attends Marty’s lectures as well as her own.
They are also young parents, so Ruth must look after their baby too.Then the film moves on to the 1970s as affable tax attorney Marty and fiercely intelligent law professor Ruth spot a clear case of gender discrimination against a man who is caring for his ailing mother (in the tax laws, only women can be carers).
Director Mimi Leder mixes history lessons and legal jargon with the beats of an inspirational drama. Nuance may have been sacrificed, but it’s a winning combination.
On The Basis Of Sex,