Liam Neeson back for revenge in ‘Cold Pursuit’

“Cold Pursuit” is the kind of movie that places its tongue firmly in cheek — and then chops off the whole head.

That’s not just a rhetorical device, by the way; the movie includes a beheading, among other delights.

On the surface, Hans Petter Moland’s film (a remake of his own 2014 Norwegian movie, “In Order of Disappearance”) is yet another Liam-Neeson-gets-revenge action thriller. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find … another Liam-Neeson-gets-revenge action thriller. But one with quite a few laughs thrown in amidst the unlikely

‘Cold Pursuit’

Great Fair Hans Petter Moland. Liam Neeson, Emmy Rossum, Laura Dern.

R for strong violence, drug material and some language including sexual references.

Bad

Good Bomb

ugly heroics.

Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow operator in a small Colorado town. He lives in a cabin with his wife, Grace

(Laura Dern, who one hopes didn’t get paid by the minute, or word), and their son, Kyle (Neeson’s real-life son, Micheál Richardson). The deer carcass hanging in their freezer is probably foreshadowing of some sort, or maybe just a dietary choice.

Whatever the case, Kyle works as a baggage handler at the local airport where, one day after work, he’s kidnapped and killed by bad guys. Settle down, this isn’t a spoiler. It’s the engine that drives the narrative. The killers pump Kyle full of heroin, so that he dies of an overdose.

Grace believes that Kyle was leading a secret life. Nels thinks not, and suspects a sinister motive for his son’s death. Events conspire for him to find out some information, just enough that he becomes a cold-blooded vengeance-seeking machine, gradually killing his way up a criminal organization’s ladder.

I know what you’re thinking — that this sounds like “Taken,” in which Neeson plays a regular guy on a killing spree to find his kidnapped daughter. I thought it sounded like “Payback,” in which Mel Gibson did something similar.

But other plot strands come into play. The main bad guy is Viking (Tom Bateman), an obnoxious snot who inherited the family business — drug dealing on a massive scale — from his father. Meanwhile, Viking runs afoul of a Native American group of drug dealers and sabotages the peace his father had negotiated years before. meanwhile, the town’s rookie cop (Emmy Rossum) smells a rat, and the possibility of some bigtime police work, though she’s a little slow to piece things together.

It’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s meant to be. Nels proves to be a talented killer without any prior experience, and there are a lot of implausible plot developments — which, again, is part of the experience. Moland brings a lot of black humor to the film, along with odd little touches like the screen going black and then the name and years of the birth and death of each character who is killed showing up, along with a symbol of their religious affiliation. It’s weird and then funny and then, at one point, kind of hilarious.

The great William Forsythe provides another highlight as Wingman, Nels’ almost-estranged brother, a former mobster who proves useful (and funny). He’s in it just enough — a sign, among others, that Moland knows his way around a story and how to tell it. There isn’t a lot of wasted time or effort here. Cold efficiency informs everything about the film.

As for Neeson, well, he’s once again reliable as an older guy pushed beyond the edge into seeking vengeance for a family member. He doesn’t do anything particularly different here — for all the film’s humor, he never cracks a smile — but you know what you’re getting.

The question is whether you still want it. And for now, with everything else “Cold Pursuit” has going for it, why not?