Film Review: Cold Pursuit

"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. 

Overall Score: 6/10

Film Review: You Were Never Really Here

"Joe, Wake Up. It's A Beautiful Day..."

Introduced to the ways of Scottish director Lynne Ramsay back in 2011 with the jaw-dropping, unrelenting and unforgettable We Need To Talk About Kevin, her Terrence Malick sensibility of putting the audience on hold for whatever project ultimately comes up next has resulted in a six year long wait for You Were Never Really Here, a similarly twisted and powerful crime thriller based on Jonathan Ames novel of the same name and featuring Joaquin Phoenix (Inherent Vice) as Joe, a retired war veteran with a tortured psych and suicidal vulnerability who is tasked by a U.S State Senator in hunting down his young daughter who has been in lost in the seedy underbelly of a contemporary and morally duplicitous New York City. With We Need To Talk About Kevin setting the ground-rules for audience expectations when it comes to the mind of a director unafraid to tackle hardened and controversial subject matters, You Were Never Really Here is a hallucinatory, startling and entirely captivating work of art which merges genre within genres and results in ninety minutes of sheer white-knuckle tension and a collection of set-pieces which will rank up there with the best evidence of cinema audiences will see this year. 

With narrative similarities to Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic, Taxi Driver, something of which many have commented on already, Ramsay's latest is much more infatuated with the harrowing mind of its' leading character, the brutish, bearded and morally conflicted figure of Phoenix's Joe, a subverted private investigator whose specific speciality seemingly lies in locating lost children, a career choice somewhat channelled by his own troubling childhood and past traumas, elements of the movie which are highlighted in sporadic, sometimes terrifying flashbacks which couldn't help but evoke the ghostly imagery of the The Shining, particularly in the film's final act in which we see Joe scour the surroundings of an Overlook Hotel-inspired residence and is greeted with physical manifestations of his numerous nightmares. With the film reeking of style and a Winding Refn infused sensibility, the Jonny Greenwood score topples even his own outstanding work on Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, with a mix of screeching strings and new wave electronica perfectly pumping up the emotion with one stroke and then creating an unbearable level of hostility and tension with the other, and with Thomas Townend's luscious, vibrant cinematography creating a staggeringly beautiful landscape for Joe's character to be absorbed within, You Were Never Really Here is a real treat for the senses. 

Whereas We Need To Talk About Kevin was constructed around a revisionist tale of the creation of man into monster which relied heavily on backstory and flashbacks, You Were Never Really Here only utilises these elements in an short and snappy basis, with the narrative much more linear in nature, and with the style and substance both accompanying each other majestically hand in hand, to call the movie anything other than heartily fulfilling is a complete and utter falsehood. Boasting extraordinary set pieces including a violent rescue attempt shown only through the ghostly image of CCTV cameras and a The Shape of Water-esque funeral scene which will be hard to to top as the most heartbreaking scene this year, Ramsay's film is a stunning achievement, one which features Joaquin Phoenix at a level of acting that's hard to better, and one which lives long in the memory after the final credits begin to appear on screen. With the seven year gap between her last and recent release, it seems Ramsay is indeed a filmmaker who desires quality above all else, and after experiencing You Were Never Really Here, for that is what the movie undeniably is, a groundbreaking experience, it comes at no surprise that her latest venture is very much worth the wait.

Overall Score: 9/10