Review: Cold Pursuit Takes the Revenge Thriller for a Self-Reflexive Spin

In the decade-plus since Liam Neeson’s avenging father from Pierre Morel’s Taken, with his “particular set of skills,” struck out to re-take his kidnapped daughter, an entire subgenre of action film has arisen around middle-aged male characters who inflict their hidden, superhuman capacity for violence on throngs of younger, often ethnically “other” goons. And these films have had a successful run, but the last stage of every genre’s evolution is a certain descent into self-parody. And just as film noir’s death knell was sounded by the wicked Kiss Me Deadly, and RoboCop prematurely announced the demise of the ’80s action hero, so has Hans Petter Moland’s Cold Pursuit gutted the revenge thriller that Neeson helped popularize, and with no small help from the actor himself.

Cold Pursuit’s quickly disregarded MacGuffin concerns drug smuggling, which is appropriate given the way Moland and screenwriter Frank Baldwin use the guise of a straightforward revenge thriller to smuggle in a parody of the genre. Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snow-plow driver living outside of Kehoe, Colorado, whose adult son, Kyle (Micheál Richardson), is murdered by drug dealers when his co-worker steals a shipment of cocaine. The killers fake Kyle’s death as a heroin overdose, but Nels is unable to accept that his son was a junkie. He soon embarks on a predictable quest for vengeance, pummeling and shooting his way through a drug operation headed by a kingpin known as Viking (Tom Bateman).

The cues that Cold Pursuit is actually an irreverent comedy pile up over the first act—they snowball, one could say. At first, the film’s humor scans as a misplaced tone. From the beginning, George Fenton’s odd musical score—most prominently, a jaunty mandolin tune—repeatedly undermines the film’s most harrowing moments. Strange, too, is that every character’s death is marked by a venerating title card, which contradicts the action film’s guiding ethos that some lives are worth more than others. And even when Moland stages a near-one-minute sequence in which characters wait in awkward silence as morgue attendants noisily work a foot pump to raise the trolley on which Kyle’s body rests, you may not yet feel comfortable letting out a laugh. But that’s the point at which the film most clearly announces it won’t be treating even innocent deaths with any hand-wringing sentimentality.

The body count quickly escalates in Cold Pursuit, which memorializes each capped gangster as Coxman’s hulking snow plow runs roughshod over moral considerations and narrative logic. Killing becomes for Coxman a kind of ritual, as after bludgeoning, strangling, or shooting a henchman, he somberly wraps him in chicken wire and tosses him into a waterfall, always at the same location. Ritualistic, too, is the film’s recapitulation of the stock scenes of the hypermasculine action film: the avenger, seething with rage, confronts the arrogant murderer; the hero showcases his determination and know how by fashioning his unique weapon; and the villain wantonly murders an underling for a minute transgression.

Increasingly, the film exposes these overfamiliar tropes as shallow, indulgent fantasies of violence. Sometimes, Moland accomplishes this self-reflexive spin by ratcheting up the brutality of a scenario; at one point, after failing to kill his first victim, Coxman strangles the man again. But Moland also makes Coxman look ridiculous, having him slink incognito through a crowded nightclub in his conspicuously oversized parka, struggle with his cufflinks as he prepares to kidnap Viking’s child, and break the laws of physics as his monstrous snow plow almost appears to teleport to the opposite end of a narrow mountain road.

In case it hasn’t occurred to viewers by the end of Cold Pursuit’s first act that they aren’t watching the usual film about Liam Neeson righteously breaking people’s bones, Moland pulls the rug out from under us, sidelining Coxman as the narrative pursues the sprawling consequences of the man’s murders. Viking concludes that his lieutenants are being picked off by a gang of Native Americans headed by White Bull (Tom Jackson), and begins a turf war with them. The middle section of the film focuses almost exclusively on these rival entities and two Kehoe cops (Emmy Rossum and John Doman) who unnecessarily involve themselves in the investigation. The bodies pile up as the film willfully strays from its expected center, focusing on violent hijinks, one-off jokes, and conversations that turn out to be the setup not for weighty plot twists, but for brief, belated punchlines.

It’s the way Cold Pursuit’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective. Much of its broader bits of business—funny gangster nicknames, crotch-punch humor, Viking’s overreaction to the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup—could easily be transplanted unchanged to an earnest thriller, and often aren’t funny on their own. But the persistence of this irreverent humor, and the deployment of irony at moments we would expect to be the film’s dramatic anchoring points, estrange us from the story and let us see the brutality and emptiness of the genre that turned Cold Pursuit’s star into a major box office draw. When, early in the film, Coxman’s wife (Laura Dern in a regrettably minor role) absconds from their home, she appears to leave him a farewell card. Drawing it out of its envelope, though, Coxman finds it blank on all sides. The moment is humorous, but it also reminds us that revenge is a zero-sum game, an empty note in a blank envelope.