Anthony Kirby takes a look back at icy thriller, Cold Pursuit.
A remake of the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance - starring Stellan Skarsgård and directed by Hans Peter Moland - Cold Pursuit is set in Denver in the dead of winter. A worthy successor to Liam Neeson’s performances in Taken 1 and 2, this film's pacing is excellent. The tension never lets up.
The Ballymena-born actor plays Nels Coxman, a snowplough operator who’s named Person of the Year for his service in Kehoe, a small town in Colorado. Coxman and his wife (Laura Dern) have their lives turned upside down by the death of their only son Kyle (Michael Richardson, Neeson’s actual 22-year-old son). As an airport maintenance worker, he dies of a drug overdose in a heist gone wrong. Though grief-stricken, Coxman knows his son. Drugs were never on the table. Neither parent accepts the police verdict and Coxman becomes obsessed with finding the truth. First he visits the site where his son’s body was found and later through personal enquiries and newspaper searches on the drug scene.
This tangled web begins to unravel bit by bit. Working with a sawed-off shotgun, Coxman dispatches petty drug lord after petty drug lord. He has a methodical way of disposing of bodies: wrapping them in chicken wire and dumping them in a fast-running waterfall, knowing that pike and other rough fish will strip the cadavers of flesh. Coxman works his way up the chain to the boss known as Viking (Tom Bateman). This don, a divorced yuppie sociopath with shared custody of his sensitive twelve-year-old son, recommends that the bookish boy use Golding’s Lord of the Flies as a life manual. The question is, how far will Coxman go to enact his revenge?
Reminiscent of the classic 1970s film Death Wish, and with a similar body count, Cold Pursuit has a quirky sense of humour, especially in the graphics that appear on screen after each evil character is dispatched. In deference to the genre, the final scene is predictable but hints at a new definition of family for Coxman and Ryan. Perhaps a plan for the sequel was in the works at the time?
Cold Pursuit is available to stream online now.
