Rotten Tomatoes: 90%
Metacritic: 67/100
Written Reviews:
”Cold Pursuit” might have all the trappings of those junky late-era Liam Neeson movies where the aging Irish actor murders a small army of people like some kind of AARP-eligible Rambo, but Hans Petter Moland’s mordantly hilarious comic thriller doesn’t wait long to defile expectations. The fact that it opens with an Oscar Wilde quote should be enough to confuse anyone who’s bracing for another tedious riff on “Taken.” The quote reads: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go,” and while that may seem like a pretentious little preamble for a film that features Neeson shooting a bridal shop clerk in the face with a sawed-off sniper rifle, it turns out to be the perfect table-setting for a fiendishly entertaining, pitch-black revenge story about a decent man who develops a violent knack for being the worst the worst part of anyone’s day.
This is an unexpectedly hilarious movie. The original film was something of a comedy-in-disguise as well. This version, perhaps if only due to the localized nature of many of the jokes (there’s a reference to the sad Cleveland Browns that slew me) had me laughing even harder. It’s not that the film is full of pratfalls or sight gags so much Baldwin’s dialogue is so specific and so lived-in that it becomes a ghoulish pleasure to watch these people talk to each other.
Chris Nashawaty - Entertainment Weekly
If [Cold Pursuit] sounds like murder-by-numbers Liam Neeson Mad Libs, well, it kind of is. But what sets Cold Pursuit apart from its predecessors is its tone. It has the jokey, self-amused vibe of an Elmore Leonard novel or one of those arch, wannabe Tarantino knock-offs that sprouted up like toadstools in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and were quickly forgotten. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, but that doesn’t stand in the way of it goosing its bloodbath set pieces with irreverent, off-kilter gallows humor.
Both the action and the comic elements in “Cold Pursuit” work reasonably well. Neeson can do justifiable homicide in his sleep by this point, but it’s still fun to watch him dispatch goons and scumbags. And most of the film’s gags land, particularly Viking’s helicopter-parent preoccupation with his son’s diet and the pokes at proper language when referring to indigenous peoples. It’s the combo of dark humor and violence where the movie never quite reaches a balance. To be too jokey removes the stakes of the killings, and to be too grotesquely violent makes the laughs catch in the throat. This isn’t an impossible mix, as the Coens and other filmmakers have proven over the years, but Moland and Baldwin fall a bit short.
That's not to say that Cold Pursuit doesn't also possess a wicked sense of humor. The over-the-top characters, and Coxman's shocking ease of blood vengeance, are both sources of dark, sardonic laughter. There is a great deal of quirk at play in Cold Pursuit, a quality perhaps more openly enjoyed by '90s indie junkies like myself. Action aficionados may be frustrated by Cold Pursuit, especially after the action-packed first act; Those first few kills are undeniably awesome. But this is not a Taken-like shoot-'em-up. It's a weary contemplation of old men and their waning roles in criminal spheres. With Cold Pursuit, Moland, and perhaps Neeson as well, appear to be closing the book on a certain type of revenge thriller that has been Neeson's stock in trade for the last 11 years. We've had a lot of fun, but Cold Pursuit argues that it's okay to mourn the passing of a genre now.
“Cold Pursuit” isn’t concerned with being the type of non-stop action vehicle where Neeson utilizes elaborate fight choreography and does complicated stunt work. This film’s brutality is grounded in reality. Sure, the unrelenting tension mounts into a climactic shootout, but the rest of the picture is more akin to the razor-sharp precision and gallows humor of “Fargo” than the merciless vigilantism of “Taken.”
Michael Phillips - Chicago Tribune
The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of “Cold Pursuit,” which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie. In the original, Stellan Skarsgard played the avenging snow angel, and with him, at least, you got the sense of a solid if vaguely unsettling citizen unraveling, by degrees, one killing at a time. With Neeson it’s different: He’s like the wedge at the front of his own plow, taking care of business efficiently, and not for a moment anything resembling human.
Submitted January 29, 2019 at 10:22AM by carchasemovies http://bit.ly/2DDwMSw