Cold Pursuit  ★★★

DON’T go to Liam Neeson’s latest film Cold Pursuit expecting another Taken.

Yes, it’s an action/thriller, but it also comes with veins of absurdity and black humour that add a Fargoesque atmosphere to the bloody proceedings.

Cold Pursuit is based on a 2014 Norwegian film called In Order of Disappearance. That film, directed by Hans Peter Molland, leant even more into absurdist territory and was highly entertaining and full of unexpected moments.

The American remake, also directed by Molland, doesn’t quite reach the same heights but is still a nice change for both Neeson and filmgoers wanting something a little different to the usual run-of-the-mill actioner.

The great Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard played the lead in the 2014 film. Neeson isn’t as good, particularly with delivering the deadpan humour, but he’s still believable as a father who inadvertently starts a bloody gang war while investigating the murder of his son.

The remake relocates the film from Scandinavia to the Canadian Rocky Mountains and a similarly small community, just a couple of hours from a major city but significantly isolated during winter by constant snowfall.

At the start of the film, Neeson’s character Nels Coxman is being recognised as Citizen of the Year for his role keeping local roads open as the council’s snowplow driver.

Nels and wife Grace (Laura Dern) are non-plussed by the attention and their adult son Kyle can’t attend as he’s rostered to work as a baggage-handler at the local airport.

Kyle is murdered and the grief-stricken Nels takes it upon himself to find the killers. Unfortunately Nels gets the wrong idea of whose to blame and leaves a trail of bodies, sometimes inadvertently, in his vengeful wake.

This causes two rival gangs to blame each other, ultimately leading to an exciting and bloody shoot-out.

The film stays close to the source material, has a good music score and is well photographed by Philip Ogaard who also worked on In Order of Disappearance.

The best aspect of the script is that every character, however minor, has small moments to shine, including Tom Bateman as Viking, one of the gang bosses, and William Forsyth as an old buddy of Nels who help his track Viking down.

Both films, along with 2016 thriller The Conspiracy of Faith, auger well for director Molland to possibly deliver something extraordinary in the future.