Mark Reviews Movies: COLD PURSUIT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2019

This remake of a five-year-old Norwegian movie doesn't do much to set itself apart from the original, which is too bad. The original, called In Order of Disappearance in the United States (a generic departure from its actual title Kraftidioten, which translates into "prize idiot" and is, without a doubt, a much better title by any metric), could have benefited from a few fixes—a bit of tightening, a sharper focus on its lead character, a more cohesive sense of tone. Instead, we get a beat-by-beat, although not shot-for-shot, remake with Cold Pursuit, directed by Hans Petter Moland, who also helmed the 2014 movie.

The location and actors have changed, of course, and there are a few cultural tweaks in Frank Baldwin's screenplay so that story fits the new backdrop, the snow-covered mountains—and, well, everything else—of Colorado. It's a tale of rival drug dealers and their gangs, along with a man of simple wants and needs, who finds himself seeking revenge and accidentally starts a war between the criminal crews in the process.

That story begins as a straightforward revenge thriller, albeit one that acknowledges that an ordinary man might have some difficulty in the particulars of hunting down career criminals and killing them. This is especially true of Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson), a lifelong snow-plow driver who lives in the mountains above the valley city of Kehoe.

He is, in fact, almost extraordinarily ordinary, and the tale begins with him receiving an award from the city as its citizen of the year. In his acceptance speech, Nels comments that driving the same stretch of road day in and day out often has had him thinking of the metaphorical road less traveled. It's a road he doesn't regret ignoring, because it has brought him a happy life with his wife Grace (Laura Dern) and now-adult son Kyle (Micheál Richardson).

Life as Nels knows it ends, though, when Kyle is found dead in Denver—the result of a heroin overdose. The father is convinced that his son didn't do drugs. We know that Kyle was killed by a gang led by Trevor "Viking" Calcote (Tom Bateman), but the police write off Nels' suspicions as denial about his son's life. There won't be an investigation.

At this point, the movie—as well as its originator, for that matter—begins its rush. The screenplay establishes the basic plot, introduces a slew of new characters, establishes the plot involving them, introduces a new bunch of characters, and makes the requisite, often coincidental connections between the assorted characters and plot points. It only slows down for some minimal character beats, most of them serving as jokes, and to memorialize the names of the many fatalities.

It's all hastily orchestrated. In a single moment, Nels goes from a man about to commit suicide to a man with a half-baked plan to kill everyone who was responsible for his son's murder. Baldwin and Moland don't have much concern for Nels as anything more than an ordinary man who's forced, by way of his grief, to do terrible things.

The movie certainly doesn't care about that grief, though, and it cares even less about the life he once had. Grace disappears without warning, taking her clothes and leaving a blank piece of paper as her farewell. We can only assume it's because the filmmakers, in the least generous interpretation of the decision, have no clue how to handle the potential of an actual human relationship. A more generous and likely interpretation is that they assume such humanity would get in the way of the complicated plot and comically detached tone.

Watching the same material as the original movie play out in a slightly different way helps—unfortunately for the filmmakers—in pinpointing how that tone undermines what the movie sets out to do from the start. There is some humor to Nels' initial vengeance-seeking. It's dark and macabre (His failed attempt to strangle one criminal is the signal for that), but it's also grounded by Nels' position as a perennially ordinary man, who even tries to turn murder into something ordinary.

The majority of the remainder of the story, though, shifts its focus toward the gangsters, their attempts to figure out who's killing their compatriots, and then the inevitable war with White Bull's (Tom Jackson) gang of Native-American drug dealers (This version also gives a pair of cops, played by Emmy Rossum and John Doman, the unenviable task of figuring out what the audience already has seen). Nels and everything that his character could bring to the table are sidelined in favor of more killings and an increasingly detached sense of humor—from a discussion about nicknames to a one about the ethics of a hired assassin.

Eventually, it's all a cosmic joke on these characters and their plans—from one kidnapping being upstaged by another and all the way through to the movie's final beat, which turns a grisly death-by-misadventure into a confetti-blasting punch line. By the end, Cold Pursuit doesn't have a handle on its tone, its characters, or its purpose.

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