Quirkiest action movie on Netflix is sadly leaving soon

In the early days, before movies became talkies, it was easy to show foreign films in the USA. Just insert new title cards in English, and film fans in St. Louis could watch and understand the latest offering from France or Germany. But then sound came and changed everything.

Of course, distributors in the United States could add subtitles or dub in new voices, but if they really wanted to sell the movie to an American audience, they could also just go ahead and make a new, English-language version.

Whether it is repurposing the Japanese classic Rashomon as The Outrage or taking Spain’s Abre los ojos and turning it into Vanilla Sky, producers in the USA are constantly scouring the globe for some hot property to acquire, rewrite, recast, and in so doing, capture a whole new audience.

Netflix viewers are running out of time to check out Cold Pursuit

Usually, an American director helms the English-language project. But every so often, the new producer elects to have the original filmmaker stay on. It happened when Takashi Shimizu remade his Grudge movies. It happened when Michael Haneke took a new crack at Funny Games.

And it happened just five years ago when Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland moved his 2014 slow-burn thriller In Order of Disappearance from the fictional town of Tyos, Norway, to the equally fictional town of Kehoe, Colorado, and rechristened it Cold Pursuit.

That American version, which leaves Netflix at the end of this month, was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019. It’s blend a action, violence, atmosphere, and humor divided critics, but I’m here to tell you that if you like quirky, suspenseful action movies, you’ll want to see it while you can.

It would be easy to write Cold Pursuit off as simply one more film in the Taken series. It stars Liam Neeson. He plays a snow plow driver in Kehoe who leads a quiet life until his twenty-something son is murdered. Then he goes on a major revenge tour. I know – you’ve seen this story before.

But not quite like this. For one thing, Moland fills his story with dark humor, as cold as the driven snow that constantly fills the screen. That humor is, at times, highly sophomoric. Neeson’s character’s name is Nels Coxman, a name that gets laughed at several times. (Stellan Skarsgard, who stars in the original, is named Nils Dickman. Moland does like his genitalia-inspired humor.) But it can also be sublime, as when a precocious boy snuggles against his kidnapper and sleepily asks “Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?”

That child is the son of Cold Pursuit’s chief villain, known by his nickname Viking. We learn that all of the criminals who make up a large portion of the cast have nicknames. It’s a thing amongst gangsters.

Viking is played to psychotic perfection by Tom Bateman, the British actor who has recently appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie movies. His Viking is a health nut with a short fuse, who operates under a very peculiar and rigid code of ethics. It is a great performance that manages to walk the balance beam between terrifying and hilarious.

That is true of the movie as a whole. The blood will flow and the body count will rise rather quickly – each new corpse is signaled by a still frame with the character’s name and a tombstone image. But Moland never lets things go too far without tossing in some quirky humor. He even uses that still frame device as a comic tool, occasionally not even bothering to show the murder itself but simply cutting to the name and tombstone, and allowing us to fill in what must have happened.

When Al Pacino recreated another Skarsgard role for an American remake of Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002), he made the character louder and more of an extrovert. No surprise there, given the stereotypical nature of Scandinavian heroes and the bombast of Pacino. But if anything, Neeson’s vengeful father is even more subdued than Skarsgard’s original. Moland balances that by turning up the intensity of all that surrounds Nels Coxman.

In addition to Bateman, who is a more finely tuned psychopath than Pal Sverre Valheim Hagan in the original film, he also gets excellent turns from Domenick Lombardozzi as Viking’s sympathetic chief henchman, who has a passion for fantasy football, Raoul Trujillo as Lombardozzi’s opposite number with the rival crew of native American’s who do battle with Viking’s men, and Emmy Rossum as a cutthroat new Kehoe cop intent on doing whatever she can to put an end to the rapidly increasing body count.

Rossum’s role is significantly larger than the comparable cop role in Moland’s original. That is just one of the character’s he either invented or else expanded upon to make the second version seem like a much more complete universe. A lot of people meet violent ends in Cold Pursuit, but in Moland’s hands, we get to know all of them, and they all get their own moments.

If there is a theme in Cold Pursuit, it involves fathers and sons. So it makes sense that the biggest change Moland made in crafting his remake was to paint a more vivid portrait of Viking’s young son. The boy will play a major role in the climax. Moland checks in on him more often and with better material than he did in the original.

He also builds on the beautifully austere look of the movie. Many scenes are staged against blinding white backdrops – whether it is the snow that is a constant presence outside, or the pristine white interiors with which Viking surrounds himself. That white shows off the splattering blood quite nicely.

Though bloody at times, Cold Pursuit is not a rip-roaring roller coaster ride in the manner of Jason Bourne or Ethan Hunt. There are no motorcycle jumps and/or falls from airplanes. Just a snowplow, and a hang glider that adds one final piece of black humor. Cold Pursuit is involving, hypnotic, and very funny. If you enjoy quirky, slow-burn action movies, make sure you add it to your list before it disappears.

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