Checked out the new Liam-Neeson-Is-a-Snow-Plow-Driver-On-A-Revenge-Quest movie Cold Pursuit. You know, that old chestnut. How many times must we see snow plow revenge movies? Seriously. 🙂
Anyhow, Cold Pursuit is an odd film that IS about a snow plow driver who is out for revenge when his adult son is murdered by… someone. Figuring out how who needs to die takes some effort but eventually the body count rises and the gangsters responsible for the drug trade start to notice. And they blame the rival Native American drug lords instead of the random snow plow driver. And then there are even more dead bodies.
This film is bizarre. It starts out feeling like a serious revenge thriller but with a random dose of comedic music as Neeson hides the bodies. It feels almost like they completed the film, realized it was missing something, and then just added in some goofy music to cover up that the film wasn’t working. It was tonal whiplash and it was bad… but the longer the movie goes, the more evidence points to the fact this film has more in common with Fargo and In Bruges than was immediately evident.
Yeah, this is ultimately a very dark comedy. The trailers suggest that’s the case but the movie doesn’t immediately present itself right. But as you get into the groove of its crazy world, you’ll either go with it’s commitment to weirdness or get turned off. I started to groove on it, even if sometimes it felt like it was going too far or spending way too much time on incidental subplots and quirky mobsters.
And you’d better be ok with spending time on the various gangster clans and their obsessions because Liam Neeson vanishes from the middle part of the flick. It’s almost like they forget there’s a blood revenge filled snow plow operator out there. Which is ok with me – I like Liam Neeson but the other characters and subplots were more enjoyable than yet another revenge flick.
So, yeah, three cheers to the commitment this movie makes to doing whatever in heck it wants. Its lucky that they managed to make it work and not, say, come across as a derivative “me too” Cohen brothers knock off (which it kind of is, admittedly). I’ve seen much better movies like it – Fargo and In Bruges, for example – but for a bloody revenge film with a sense of humor, it’s pretty good.
Score: 82