This movie is a typical Liam Neeson and yet this movie is also refreshingly different. It's like the title suggests: A typical Liam Neeson is what I would describe as a hot pursuit movie - and this time we get a cold pursuit. It's a pursuit non the less, but still different.
The movie plays in Kehoe, a skiing resort in the Rocky Mountains, and Neeson's character - Nelson Coxman - is a snowplow driver. If he wouldn't work, no one could enter or leave Kehoe, which is why he's nominated as citizen of the year, even though he just does his job. But when his son mysteriously disappears, Coxman realizes a set of skills he wasn't yet aware of and with this new set of skills he sets a lunatic chain of events into motion.
When I saw the first trailer to this movie I was a bit torn. On the one hand, I like Liam Nesson action movies - I think Liam Neeson is a charismatic guy and even though a lot of people hat them - and yes, of course they are all the same and all of them reinvent the wheel - I think those movies are great. But a comedy? With Neeson? Oh my... I was fearing something that was more silly and stupid than action, and this movie could become totally stupid.
Luckily I was wrong. To be fair - it isn't a perfect movie either. There are a few weaknesses, but all in all I was really entertained by it and had a smile on my face the entire movie. The humor is really subtle and rather dark. There are no one-liners, no punchlines, nothing that expects you to burst into laughs all the time. It's rather bitter sweet dark humor, that is rather intelligent, and not always worded, but often also just induced by the style of filming, the editing or inappropriate absurd scenes. For instance there is a scene where a corpse has to be identified, and it was stored in a bottom drawer, so after pulling it out, they need to use a lever mechanism - and it felt like taking forever that the guy has to move the lever up and down so that the table is actually at a height so that the bereaved could actually finally lift the blanket and identify the corpse. These scenes remembered me of the first two episodes of Six Feet Under.
Even though it is funny it also has a lot of serious moments, and the movie is also about loss, and coping with loss, and of course about taking revenge. The "cold" in cold pursuit can be taken literally - all in all the movie is pretty slow paced - especially compared to typical Liam Neeson movies - and this is also due to the setting and the way the movie is made. Still whenever we get to the action scenes, it will get ugly. And aesthetic - the movie tries to find a certain kind of aesthetics in violence and also is pretty innovative in the killings, showing scenes you've probably never seen before.
I would think to put this movie somewhere between "The Grey" and "Taken" - a typical Liam Neeson movie that plays slower than his other movies do, paired with the dark humor of shows such as in Six Feet Under or Death at a Funeral, just not as thick and obvious.
I was entertained, I found it refreshing, and really liked it.
Review by pygospaVIP 3BlockedParent2019-03-01T16:43:44Z
This movie is a typical Liam Neeson and yet this movie is also refreshingly different. It's like the title suggests: A typical Liam Neeson is what I would describe as a hot pursuit movie - and this time we get a cold pursuit. It's a pursuit non the less, but still different.
The movie plays in Kehoe, a skiing resort in the Rocky Mountains, and Neeson's character - Nelson Coxman - is a snowplow driver. If he wouldn't work, no one could enter or leave Kehoe, which is why he's nominated as citizen of the year, even though he just does his job. But when his son mysteriously disappears, Coxman realizes a set of skills he wasn't yet aware of and with this new set of skills he sets a lunatic chain of events into motion.
When I saw the first trailer to this movie I was a bit torn. On the one hand, I like Liam Nesson action movies - I think Liam Neeson is a charismatic guy and even though a lot of people hat them - and yes, of course they are all the same and all of them reinvent the wheel - I think those movies are great. But a comedy? With Neeson? Oh my... I was fearing something that was more silly and stupid than action, and this movie could become totally stupid.
Luckily I was wrong. To be fair - it isn't a perfect movie either. There are a few weaknesses, but all in all I was really entertained by it and had a smile on my face the entire movie. The humor is really subtle and rather dark. There are no one-liners, no punchlines, nothing that expects you to burst into laughs all the time. It's rather bitter sweet dark humor, that is rather intelligent, and not always worded, but often also just induced by the style of filming, the editing or inappropriate absurd scenes. For instance there is a scene where a corpse has to be identified, and it was stored in a bottom drawer, so after pulling it out, they need to use a lever mechanism - and it felt like taking forever that the guy has to move the lever up and down so that the table is actually at a height so that the bereaved could actually finally lift the blanket and identify the corpse. These scenes remembered me of the first two episodes of Six Feet Under.
Even though it is funny it also has a lot of serious moments, and the movie is also about loss, and coping with loss, and of course about taking revenge. The "cold" in cold pursuit can be taken literally - all in all the movie is pretty slow paced - especially compared to typical Liam Neeson movies - and this is also due to the setting and the way the movie is made. Still whenever we get to the action scenes, it will get ugly. And aesthetic - the movie tries to find a certain kind of aesthetics in violence and also is pretty innovative in the killings, showing scenes you've probably never seen before.
I would think to put this movie somewhere between "The Grey" and "Taken" - a typical Liam Neeson movie that plays slower than his other movies do, paired with the dark humor of shows such as in Six Feet Under or Death at a Funeral, just not as thick and obvious.
I was entertained, I found it refreshing, and really liked it.