Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Cold is also anything that’s not hot – especially at the box office.
Cold is also the kind of shoulder that Liam Neeson was given – at best – following a revelation leading up to his latest release, which unsurprisingly hinged around the subject of revenge.
Cold Pursuit, therefore, brings all kinds of coldness into the mix and leaves it to the audience to pick whatever they want to take. In the film’s defence, however, it doesn’t shroud itself at all, and from the moment the trailer – or even the film’s poster for that matter – hits you, it’s evident what is on offer.
The life of your quintessential family man Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson) turns upside down following his son’s death. With his wife (Laura Dern) a companion in grief and a victim of a tragedy that comes under the most mysterious of circumstances, Nels feels he has nothing to lose in a relentless quest to get to the bottom of it.
In his pursuit for justice, Nels finds out that a drug lord Viking (Tom Bateman) is involved in his son’s death. Feeling that there are few options in terms of other routes to justice, Nels feels he needs to take matters into his own hands. And so he does.
As is evident, a significant chunk of film buffs would feel that they’ve already seen this film, given the cast and the storyline. That literally would be the case for anyone who has watched the 2014 Norwegian thriller Kraftidioten, which Cold Pursuit is a remake of. The remake even has the same director as the original: Hans Petter Moland.
And yet in many ways Cold Pursuit is precisely the kind of film Liam Neeson has been doing, and the type of role that he has been playing for the good part of a decade now. That is what might make many give the film a pass, if they haven’t exactly embraced what Neeson usually has to offer.
It has all the coldness of revenge, and all the chilliness of a gripping thriller, but the film centers around a sophisticated spine: black humour
Even so, in many other ways Cold Pursuit takes everything that he has been up to in recent times up a few notches. It has all the coldness of revenge, and all the chilliness of a gripping thriller, but the film centers around a sophisticated spine: black humour.
Cold Pursuit is not just a revenge thriller with a checklist of dead bodies and a two-hour shift to tick them all off. It has intelligent writing that will simultaneously offer varying, often contradicting, forms of entertainment leaving you chuckling at the most unusual of times and being glued to the many dimensions that the film takes you into.
A lot of the humour coefficient is added by Tom Bateman, who adds the comic layers to the pulsating action that Neeson constructs. While the focus was always going to be on Neeson, with or without the controversy, it’s safe to say that Bateman adds those tinges to Cold Pursuit that prevent it from being yet another Liam Neeson 2010s film.
Laura Dern and Liam Neeson in Cold Pursuit
Although, of course, the fact that it is very much a Liam Neeson film would be enough to put off many from giving it a go, just as it would actually be the primary source of attention for many of his fans.
Either way, it’s important that Cold Pursuit is delinked from the controversy that Neeson got embroiled into while sharing his own past experience, regardless of what one’s perspective on it might be.
The film is a chilling and entertaining escape from reality, and it would be a shame if it turns out to be events in the real world that actually take down what otherwise is a film that achieves most of what it eyes.
