Rating: R
Director: Hans Petter Moland
The worst thing a person could do, sitting down to watch Cold Pursuit, is to assume this is your average Liam Neeson revenge flick. That may lead to disappointment, as in reality this violent action yarn is more a darkly-comic parody of a Liam Neeson revenge flick, starring the man himself. Think an over-the-top Neeson revenge film, as directed by a snarky Quentin Tarantino wannabe who is a huge fan of the film Fargo, and you've got a better idea of what awaits in this story of Nels Coxman (Neeson), a snowplow driver living just outside a popular resort town in the Rockies, whose sole job is to keep all the roads clear and passable during the winter months. Early in the film Nels's son (barely shown in the film) is killed by local drug dealers who make it appear an overdose, and while the police dismiss the death as an addict's accident, a grieving Nels knows in his heart that his son didn't do drugs - and when confirmation of that ends in the deaths of his boy's killers by Nels, the snowplow driver opens up a can of worms between the two major criminal syndicates in the area, igniting a war as Nels fights his bloody way to the man at the top responsible for the loss of his only child. While Cold Pursuit has its share of cool gangland fight scenes - including a loud, all-consuming final blood bath of sorts - most of its characters are one-dimensional stereotypes, we're never given any time with Nels and his son to bond with either character, and even Laura Dern as Nels's wife is given virtually nothing to do and soon disappears from the film entirely. The touches of dark humor work well to help the film stand out, but overall Cold Pursuit is just a slightly-better-than average, darkly-comedic revenge yarn that works okay viscerally - but lacks fleshed-out characters that make you care enough about what's going on to make the film linger for long in your mind, once the end credits roll. 6/10 stars
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