"When You Drive The Same Road Day After Day, It’s Easy To Think About The Road Not Taken..."
Making the headlines recently for some rather interesting and Twitter inciting comments, Liam Neeson returns to the big screen once again in Cold Pursuit, an interesting, off-beat and knowingly extravagant crime drama which sees Neeson resorting back to the sort of role audiences have come to expect from him ever since the successful release of Taken back in 2008. With Steve McQueen's, Widows, last year marking a slight return to top dramatic form for the actor, Neeson's latest doesn't exactly manage to fall into the same level of cinematic greatness, but with a particularly strange, genre-crossing blend of Coen style black comedy and at times, the rather jerking cinematic sensibility of Yorgos Lanthimos, Cold Pursuit is still a rather enjoyable, if overly pointless, B-movie revenge flick. Acting as a direct American remake of the 2014 Swedish flick, In Order of Disappearance, starring the one and only Stellan Skarsgård, the director of the original, Hans Peter Molland, follows in the footsteps of Michael Haneke by choosing to take charge of the English speaking version by himself as we drop into the life of Neeson's Nelson Coxman, the recently awarded "Citizen of the Year" from the ski and tourism heavy locale of Kehoe, who suddenly chooses to take sweet and merciless revenge against a local gang organisation after his son is found dead.
Whilst the set up is the a-typical Liam Neeson cinematic vehicle many have come to expect from an actor who has seemed to have revelled in a latter day shift into action flicks, Cold Pursuit boldly attempts to stick out from the likes of Taken, The Commuter or Run All Night by subverting the rather serious tones prevalent in Neeson's previous and almost coming across as a cheeky, overly knowing micky take. With Neeson's Coxman shifting from ordinary everyman to cold hearted hitman in the space of about thirty seconds, it's fair to say that character development isn't exactly the top priority for Molland, whose decision to play the drama as an uncanny blend of Fargo and Death Wish works rather effectively for the opening hour as we are introduced to the varied strands of character groups including the local police department and the raging war between Tom Bateman's (Murder on the Orient Express) mentally unstable drug lord, Viking, and Tom Jackson's Native American crime boss, White Bull. Whilst the sensibility of the film is fun enough to sort of hold together, the film is ironically personified by a recurring motif in which after every character death is an on-screen epitaph to the respected fallen, a particularly odd element which on the first couple of uses are rather giggle-inducing, yet after the fifty eighth time, does become slightly tiresome, a phrase which come the end of almost two hours of pointless violence and murder, pretty much sums up the film rather nicely, and whilst Cold Pursuit isn't the worst latter life Neeson flick, see Taken 3 for reference point, it sure ain't no Taken. Although I'm still not sure who's driving the boat.
