Monday, December 14, 2020

3 Short Paragraphs: Cold Pursuit

2019, Hans Petter Moland (In Order of Disappearance) -- Amazon

I swore the original was also called Cold Pursuit, but apparently not. Hans Petter Moland returns to (re)direct the American version of his own movie from Norway. Based on the trailer, I can see that he pretty much just re-did his original movie (with Stellan Skarsgård), shot for shot, transplanting it to Kehoe, a ski resort town in Colorado, while retaining the otherworldly snowbound look of the original. I will have to go back to Amazon and find the original, as I know it's there somewhere.

Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson, Love Actually) is a snowplow driver and Kehoe, Citizen of the Year award winner. He and his wife Grace (Laura Dern, Jurassic Park) live in an absolutely lovely little cabin high on a mountain, all alone. Soon after, their son is murdered by drug dealers, but local police just blame a heroin addiction & overdose. Grace leaves Nels, as he won't acknowledge that the two didn't "know" their son. Nels knows his son didn't do drugs, and tracks down the drug dealers who killed him, to take revenge.

This movie has a very Fargo feel to it. It's not comedic per se, more just darkly amusing, as we see how ludicrous the whole revenge plot that spills into a drug gang turf war is. I have a feeling that Skarsgård played a much more reserved man than Neeson, who we are already quite convinced has a particular set of skills that lend to killing drug dealers. But the performances are great, and the visuals are incredible. Just that one scene of Nels riding the snowplow on a main road that is about 12' below the top of the snow, a line of cars slowly following him, was so familiar to snow we had when I was a kid. I just wished that the plot centered more around him, as he felt more like a catalyst to the event, than a main character.

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