OUT IN THE COLD
Liam Neeson makes another big mistake with this stinker of a movie about a snowplough driver out for revenge
Cold Pursuit (15) Verdict: Violent and misconceived ★✩✩✩✩ On The Basis Of Sex (12A) Verdict: Worthy biopic ★★★★✩
COLD Pursuit is about revenge. You might have followed the brouhaha that erupted when its star, Liam Neeson, admitted in an interview to publicise the film that he once sought vengeance in real life, prowling the streets seeking to attack a black man — any black man — after a friend was raped by a dark-skinned assailant.
This admission would count as the biggest misjudgment of Neeson’s illustrious career were it not for a bigger one: accepting the lead in Cold Pursuit. It must have seemed like easy money; yet another wearily familiar role for him as a father bent on tracking down the villains who have wrecked his happy family life.
But this isn’t a new take on the increas-ingly preposterous Taken films. It’s a deeply unpleasant picture, all the more offensive for its veneer of comedy, stretched ever-more thinly over a carnival of brutality. Humour and homicide have always rubbed along well in movies; almost 60 years separate two great examples, the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), and Martin McDonagh’s deli-ciously dark In Bruges (2008).
But the writing and plotting have to be spot on. When they are as clunky as this, the attempts at whimsy seem des-perately forced. In Cold Pursuit, the name of the victim appears on screen after each murder, under a cross (or in one case a Star of David). The long-running TV drama Six Feet Under used exactly the same device, but there it worked perfectly. Here it just feels laboured.
Cold Pursuit is director Hans Petter Moland’s remake of his own 2014 Norwegian film, In Order Of Disappearance.
Neeson plays Nelson Coxman, a humble snowplough driver who for no remotely explicable reason lives in a $2 million house overlooking the ski resort of Kehoe, Colorado. Laura Dern plays his loving wife, but not for
long. She has the good fortune to walk out of his life, and out of the script, when Coxman metamorphoses from solid citizen to ruthless vigilante after the sudden death of his son from an apparent heroin overdose.
Coxman doesn’t buy that explanation, and duly begins to dispatch one drug-dealer after another in a variety of blood-splattered ways.
Neeson, a fine actor with a high threshold for poor material, plays it straight throughout. His character carries out killings and disposes of bodies with such chilling efficiency you would swear he was the world’s great-est assassin in a former career.
But no. He just likes crime novels. And frowning. If they gave out Oscars for furrowed brows, Neeson would be a six-time winner.
When Coxman does overlook the need for discretion, blasting one baddie to death in a bridal shop, in broad daylight, with a shotgun, nobody up to and including the Kehoe police department pays the slightest attention. Like the corpses, the clichés begin to pile up. There are a couple of cops and — guess what? One is a jaded veteran, the other an eager rookie.
Coxman, meanwhile, unwit-tingly ignites a feud between two local cartels, one run by Native Americans, the other by a parody of a sociopathic drug lord, who, when not ordering hits, obsesses about the e-numbers his young son is consuming.
THIS
is meant to be funny. It’s not. All the gangsters have silly nicknames. That’s not funny, either.
The son moves centre stage when the Native Americans try to kidnap him, but Coxman abducts him first, awakening his fatherly instincts. Happily, the boy doesn’t mind being snatched, or should I say taken, by this frowning snowplough driver.
That’s the kind of movie this is — one that doesn’t respect its audience enough to inject its narrative with the vaguest believability. So why anoint it with even one star? Well, the snowy scenery is lovely. And
there’s some terrific music, although why it marries Brass In Pocket by The Pretenders to a blizzardy corpsedisposal scene is anybody’s guess.
n THE choice of music in On The Basis
Of Sex is questionable, too. A jaunty soundtrack doesn’t always fit this likeable film’s remit.
This is to tell the true story of how brilliant Brooklyn-born law professor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( splendidly played by Felicity Jones), who had herself been forever thwarted on account of her gender, helped to overturn routine sex discrimination enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
She did this with her lawyer husband Martin (Armie Hammer) by championing, in 1970, the case of a Denver man refused a tax deduction for the nurses he needed to help him care for his aged mother.
Had he been female, he’d have received it, so the Ginsburgs cleverly used apparent discrimination against men to undermine the bias against women. It’s not exactly a sexy subject and this might be the first film in history to crank up the narrative tension with a shot of a building housing the Department of Justice’s Tax Division. At least 2017’s Battle Of The Sexes, which covered similar territory in the world of sport, pivoted on a tennis match. Nevertheless, despite using some hackneyed biopic devices, director Mimi Leder does a fine job. She is aided by very good acting (Kathy Bates, Justin Theroux and Sam Waterston lend strong support), and a sometimes stolid but always compelling screenplay by Daniel Stiepleman. Neatly, and rather movingly, he is Ginsburg’s nephew, while she, at 85, is now a Supreme Court Justice and the grande dame of the U.S. legal system. A recent documentary, RBG, told her story more forensically, but hers is a life worth celebrating anew, and this is a film worth seeing.