Cold Pursuit (2019)

Directed by Hans Petter Moland. Starring Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Emmy Rossum, Domenick Lombardozzi, John Doman, Tom Jackson, William Forsythe, Julia Jones, Laura Dern, Nicholas Holmes, Raoul Trujillo, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Arnold Pinnock, Aleks Paunovic, David O’Hara, Gus Halper. [R]

Snowplow driver Neeson lives a quiet, simple life, but when his son is killed from a forced drug overdose by some shady goons, he steps out on a vendetta for vengeance. Remake of the Norwegian film, Kraftidioten, from the same director; on the surface, just another in the recent line of Neeson’s grudging middle-aged action hero pictures, but it’s sharper than most, closer to a riff on the nihilistic, twisty Tarantino-esque crime flicks from the 90s than a glossy-but-grim Euro-thriller. As a crime thriller, it’s pretty standard stuff; as a comedy (notably of the gallows persuasion), it’s pretty enjoyable, though it lacks either the grace or the audaciousness to really pull it off one way or the other. Neeson can play this kind of role in his sleep at this point, though one does wonder how this seemingly mild-mannered family man is able to pull off fatal operations with such easily-acquired skill and moral indifference.

57/100