"Cold Pursuit" Movie Review

Cold Pursuit is a remake of In Order of Disappearance, a film by Hans Petter Moland. The real kicker is that Hans also directed Cold Pursuit. He literally remade his own movie. After seeing the remake, I wonder how good the original even was for this one to be so poorly made.

The film follows Nels Coxman who is out for justice after his son Kyle was forcefully overdosed on heroine. It also follows Trevor 'Viking' Calcote, a drug lord who thinks Nels' actions are actually being carried out by a rival Native American drug lord. Nels inadvertently pits the two gangs against each other while moving up the criminal ladder to take down the man who was responsible for Kyle's death.

I will admit that the film had a wonderful setup. It established who the Coxman family was, that Kyle and his buddy were in deep with the wrong crowd, and it gave us some emotional hits to get us invested. The film slowly falls apart from there, drifting from its own established genre, migrating from dark crime to dark comedy but never really finding its way back again. After a while, plot is thrown out the window and the film just becomes a string of events, some nonsensical and some predictable. The ending was the most frustrating, attempting to cash-in on a Deadpool joke while leaving so many questions unanswered that the film becomes more complicated than it really needed to be.

The acting was probably the one redeemable quality of the film, the cast's chemistry and fluidity undeniably wonderful. Liam Neeson and Tom Bateman led the cast, they being the standouts of the crew. Laura Dern gave one of the the only emotional moments in the whole film, the other belonging to Liam.

In conclusion, Cold Pursuit was certainly no Wind River or Taken even though it tried its best to be. Then again, did it actually try its best? I'm not quite sure anymore. All I know is, this could have been far better without giving the audience whiplash from all the tonal shifts. I give the film a 2 out of 4.