It’s nice when cheesy action movies realize their inherent cheesiness and have a little fun with the audience. To be sure, much of this parental retaliation movie is played straight, enough to be affecting at the right moments. But a few of the supporting characters, and the director’s own decisions, key the audience into the filmmakers’ awareness that they are not making Hamlet here — although Shakespeare, if he were around today, might well employ Liam Neeson as a snowbound sentinel of revenge, if he were so inclined to write a silly script like the one for Cold Pursuit.

Hans Petter Moland’s film is an American remake of the 2014 Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, with which I am unfamiliar. Moland has a strong sense of black comedy which plays throughout the story as Nels Coxman (Neeson) takes revenge on the fools who led his son into drug smuggling and an early death. Coxman (everybody comments on his name, with some degree of jocularity or envy) starts killing the local drug dealers, gradually working his way up the criminal ladder, as the local cops wonder why so many people are dying in the small town of Kehoe.

The humor of the piece really helps balance the gory violence and high body count. Fans of dark comedy will enjoy the film; it reminded me of Grosse Pointe Blank in the way that it trivializes death even as it presents killing as sport. One death in particular, very very late in the story, actually made me laugh out loud. It’s that kind of movie.

I think Cold Pursuit works best as an off-kilter comedy. It certainly has the dark foundation to be a drama, but the filmmakers are not interested in mining deep emotions. Viking (Tom Bateman) is a modern villain, more entrepreneur and family man than gangster, who simply has no regard for other people. He is too easy to hate; even his own kid is afraid of him. And ultimately that is the biggest failure of the film — it is too black and white, dramatically, for its own good. ☆ ☆. 10 May 2019.