‘Cold Pursuit‘ (2019) is an American remake of a European film – Norwegian in this case – which was called ‘Kraftidioten’ or ‘In Order of Disappearance’ in the English version. In 90% of cases, American remakes are resounding cinematic failures, but I still gave this film a chance, especially because the producers had the interesting idea of inviting two of the lead creators of the Norwegian version – film director Hans Petter Moland and cinematographer Philip Remy Øgaard – to participate in the making the american version. I wrote about the Norwegian original almost ten years ago, when I saw that film which it is a combination in which characters from Tarantino’s films – not very intelligent gangsters with their special sub-culture – evolve in the frozen landscape reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ ‘Fargo’ . The American remake is far from being a disaster, but it does not reach the originality, comedy and tension of the original film. Something from the films of Tarantino and the Coen brothers remained, but we must also add here the brutal action films in which Bruce Willis and lately even Liam Neeson were specialists as a term of comparison and, perhaps, as a source of inspiration.
The premises of the story are the same as in the Norwegian film and in the novel that inspired them, although here they are dispatched in a few minutes, and I am not sure that they would have been clear to me if I had not seen the original film. Nels Coxman is a snowplow driver in the Rockies, near Denver. His son, who works at the local airport, falls victim to a mistaken identity and is kidnapped and killed by a gang of drug dealers, who try to disguise the crime as a death by drug overdose. The police hurry to close the case, but Coxman does not believe that his son was using drugs and begins to investigate the circumstances of the death. He quickly reaches those directly involved and, having no more confidence in the justice system, he does not hesitate to liquidate them. His favorite weapon is a carbine whose barrel he had cut and his favorite means of transport in the middle of winter is his snowplow. After liquidating the first batch of criminals, he aims to reach the one who sent them in their criminal actions, the head of a gang of traffickers who control a large part of the city. In a short time he will find himself involved in the wars between gangster gangs. The number of corpses increases, each time marked by a mortuary symbol, like a cinematic tombstone.
I confess that I have never been a big fan of Liam Neeson and even less of his roles in action movies, usually as a worried or grieving father. In ‘Cold Pursuit‘ he plays another such role and there is nothing in to make me change opinion. Laura Dern appears at the beginning of the film as the wife of the hero and the mother of the murdered young man, but then she disappears (leaving a blank farewell letter) and the role is too small for her talent. It is precisely the gallery of secondary characters that I liked. Two gangs of gangsters face each other, and between the bloody episodes we have the opportunity to get to know some characters drawn with originality and humor. Two examples: the band of American-Indian villains and ‘Mustang’, the character played by Domenick Lombardozzi, who acts as tutor of the son of the gangster boss, too busy with the liquidation of enemies and his own fits of hysteria to have time to be a father. Philip Remy Øgaard‘s cinematography spectacularly reconstructs the surroundings of the city of Denver (although the filming was done in Canada), but the element of horror that was created in the Norwegian film by the huge snowplow transformed into the fatal weapon is still missing. In the end, no one comes out very disappointed from watching ‘Cold Pursuit‘: neither fans of revenge action movies nor fans of gangster comedies. Maybe only Scandinavian movie lovers who are not willing to accept any compromise in an American remake.