COLD PURSUIT (2019) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

cold pursuit (2019) movie

Genre              |   Revenge Thriller

Classification   |   MA 15+

Running time   |   118 minutes

Released         |   7 February 2019

cast

Liam Neeson ... Nels Coxman
Laura Dern ... Grace Coxman
Micheál Richardson ... Kyle Coxman
Tom Bateman ... Trevor 'Viking' Calcote
Tom Jackson ... White Bull
William Forsythe ... Brock
​Domenick Lombardozzi ... Mustang

director

Hans Petter Moland

writer

Frank Baldwin ... (screenplay by)
 
Kim Fupz Aakeson ... (based on the movie 'Kraftidioten' written by)

cinematographer

​Philip Øgaard

music

​George Fenton

film editor

​Nicolaj Monberg

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box office result

Worldwide               $​76,419,755

Australia                 $​1,830,483

North America        $​32,138,862

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movie minutiae

​​Liam Neeson has stated this will be his final action movie role.

Hans Petter Moland directed the original IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (2014), and returned to direct this remake.

​Filmed in March 2017, but not released until February 2019.

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COLD PURSUIT (2019) MOVIE IMAGES

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COLD PURSUIT (2019) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Nels Coxman's quiet life as a snowplow driver comes crashing down when his beloved son dies under mysterious circumstances. His search for the truth soon becomes a quest for revenge against a psychotic drug lord named Viking and his sleazy henchmen. Transformed from upstanding citizen to coldblooded vigilante, Coxman unwittingly sets off a chain of events that includes a kidnapping, a series of deadly misunderstandings and a turf war between Viking and a rival boss.

COLD PURSUIT (2019) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 7 February 2019

Pop ​Movee Rating

Liam Neeson has single-handedly owned the “Revenge Thriller” cinema space for over a decade. His TAKEN films resonated with moviegoers who yearned for some “Old School” action and had been all but deserted by the big movie studios in favour of big-budget, blockbuster franchise events.

The first TAKEN, released back in 2008, felt like a throwback to the Crime Dramas of the 1970s. Neeson’s Bryan Mills character was cut from the same cloth as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle; two of the most iconic characters of Seventies cinema. While not as oft-quoted as Eastwood’s “Make my day…”, Neeson even did capture the pop culture zeitgeist for a few fleeting moments with his “very particular set of skills” monologue, demonstrating that strong characters need only well written dialogue to create a lasting impression.

Over the last ten years, Neeson has revisited this “Everyday Hardman” character in the two TAKEN sequels, as well as films like NON-STOP, RUN ALL NIGHT and THE COMMUTER. COLD PURSUIT is the latest film to employ Neeson in this manner, this time as Nels Coxman, a Rocky Mountains snow plough driver whose son is murdered after becoming mixed up with a Colorado crime boss.

COLD PURSUIT is a remake of the 2014 Norwegian film IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE starring Stellan Skarsgard.

Both films are directed by Hans Petter Moland.

While not a unique occurrence, Directors who remake one of their own films tend to have have waited some time in between films to do so. Some of cinema’s most famous Directors have taken the opportunity to remake earlier works. The reasons are varied, but common reasons included improved technology, Director experience and translation into another language.

There was a twenty-two year gap between Hitchcock’s versions of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. DeMille had a thirty-three year hiatus between his two versions of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. George Lucas waited twenty years for technology to finally catch-up with his imagination when he “reshaped” visual effects and improved the sound quality of his original STAR WARS trilogy.

While there are plenty of examples where there have been gaps of between five and ten years, the less than five year gap between IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE and COLD PURSUIT makes it seem like the remake has been forced out primarily for commercial reasons and not because Moland has something new or different to offer since he made IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE. Yes, the new version is an English language version, while the original is Norwegian, but there’s nothing in COLD PURSUIT, other than a different setting, that indicates that Moland has anything new to add other than the chance to cash-in on Neeson’s presence.

(In light of Neeson’s controversial racial comments in the days leading up to the film’s release, his presence in COLD PURSUIT must now be regarded as a considerable box office liability by the film’s producers…)

Other than Neeson’s comments, the biggest problem COLD PURSUIT has is Moland’s failure to match Neeson’s performance with the film’s undertone of dark comedy. With the exception of Laura Dern as Coxman’s wife, everyone else on the screen seems to be aware that there’s an exaggerated absurdity about the story.

Supporting players such as Tom Bateman, playing crime boss Trevor Calcote, and Tom Jackson, as White Bull, both seem to be in on the joke...

Bateman’s Calcote is one of the film’s few highlights. Trevor takes his crime seriously and his reliance upon proper etiquette by both friend and foe in the underworld is one of the film’s ongoing sources of its dark humour. Events escalate to the point where Trevor no longer has any control, but he continues to insist that everyone should play by the rules.

Neeson, on the other hand, appears to be oblivious to any of the film’s dark comedy. He does his level best to reinforce the stereotypical elements that he’s created through the ten plus years of Revenge Thrillers he’s appeared in playing exactly the type of character he does in COLD PURSUIT.

Unfortunately, the motivation for Neeson’s character to take his revenge (the death of his son by drug overdose) is not a comfortable starting place for viewer, but it’s also a terrible narrative choice from which to build the film’s dark comedy...

The best example of how to structure the narrative of this kind of film is the Coen Brothers 1996 classic FARGO.

Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson becomes involved in the events of the story from a “Third Person” perspective; the Police Officer investigating what’s happening. She is not emotionally connected to the absurdity unfolding before her and, like the viewer, is witnessing events as she encounters them.

COLD PURSUIT frames its story from a “First Person” perspective…

Nels Coxman is a grieving father and audience members empathise with him. His “Revenge” is justified because it’s borne from real tragedy. However, Moland’s flourishes of dark comedy, especially the whimsical music that punctuates each subsequent death, feels out of place in the context of Coxman’s circumstance.

The death of a child is not funny and Moland’s efforts to inject humour into scenes is both forced and more than just a little bit macabre because it’s challenging the viewer to laugh at the very moment a husband and wife are confronting the most awful thing that could happen to a parent.

Maybe that’s just how they roll in Norway…

COLD PURSUIT is not in the same league as Neeson’s other “Revenge Thriller” efforts. It starts strong, but the more dark comedy Moland injects into proceedings the more idiosyncratic the film becomes. The plot threads do eventually come together, but there’s little emotional payoff for any of the surviving characters.

​The film literally ends with one final death that is completely unnecessary and is a final reminder to the viewer that the previous 100+ minutes of viewing have been less of a pursuit for justice and more of a haphazard series of ill-conceived sequences demonstrating an indifferent regard to the human misery on display.

COLD PURSUIT MOVIE (2019) USEFUL LINKS

​Cold Pursuit - Wikipedia
​Cold Pursuit (2019) - IMDb
​Cold Pursuit (2019) - Rotten Tomatoes
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