BEFORE: I was reminded today that I really didn't think my little blogging project would last for so long, when I started I figured I would run out of movies in 3 years, maybe 4 tops. But that didn't happen, I kept finding films on cable, and then streaming came along, and by then watching movies was so incorporated into my daily routine that it would have been unthinkable, impossible to stop.
In the last month or so, it's been a big bright spot, something to help me look forward to tomorrow, more so than before. 10:30 pm comes around, my wife goes to sleep, I may eat dinner then if I haven't already, feed the cats, watch an episode of "Arrested Development" and start tomorrow's movie. It's only after the movie that I even think about turning on the news channels now, but with an appalling lack of good news I think most nights I'm better off playing a video-game (working my way through some "Grand Theft Auto" games again, and if the pandemic continues, there's always "Lego Star Wars"...) or reading or logging in some comic books, still working on catching up there. For what it's worth, I think that's a healthier strategy then focusing on numbers of deceased people in the greater metropolitan area. Those numbers are important, sure, but me getting more depressed than I already am isn't going to help anyone.
David O'Hara carries over from "The Professor and the Madman". Ideally I would have preferred to watch this during a winter month, but that's not a hard and fast rule. This January I watched "Smilla's Sense of Snow" and in January 2019 I programmed "The Snowman", but the linking is the most important thing right now. Linking's first, and hitting certain holidays right on the nose is second priority. I keep the chain alive and the way I want it by watching tonight's winter-based crime film in spring, c'est la vie.
THE PLOT: A grieving snowplow driver seeks revenge against the drug dealers who killed his son.
AFTER:Well, the good news is that Liam Neeson's now going to make my year-end countdown, as this is his third appearance in a film in 2020. Laura Dean also makes the cut as of today, and she'll be here tomorrow, too in a certain 2019 Oscar contender that only JUST became available for rental on iTunes. (Of course, I had the foresight to grab a screener of it, just before the lockdown began. I still don't know when either animation studio I work for will re-open, but I've got at least enough movies to make it to Father's Day, probably more if I can keep the chain alive past June, to the next benchmark on July 4. Stay tuned.)
I think this film caught some flak for just being, essentially, "Taken" on a snowplow, just as "The Commuter" was pitched as "Taken" on a Metro-North train. But I think that sells this film just a bit short, "Cold Pursuit" is much more than a riff on "Taken", of course in some ways it's also a bit less. It should be its own thing, but, really, Liam Neeson has got to step out of this comfort zone at some point, only he already did that, he was in "Men In Black: International", and the result was just not that good. So, OK, it's back to one man taking down a crime organization to save/protect his family, I guess.
The "Taken" films were rescue operations, though - save the daughter, save the ex-wife, using a particular set of skills. In this remake of the Swedish film "Kraftidioten" (which roughly translates to "In Order of Disappearance", somehow) Neeson's character's son is killed quite early, and the killers get rid of the body by taking him to an outdoor café, total "Weekend at Bernie's" style, putting a pair of sunglasses on him and then walking away. Real classy, guys. But this means that all bets are now off, and it changes the mission of his father, snowplow driver Nels Coxman, from rescue to revenge. He's free to terminate the low-level drug dealers responsible, and then work his way up the crime chain until he figures out the identity of the crime boss that ordered the hit. So, really, it's more "Punisher"-style than "Taken".
We don't really know where Coxman gets his skill-set, how he knows how to make a sawed-off gun or where he learned to fight, but he mentions hunting trips with his son, and probably everyone out in Colorado (though they clearly filmed this in Vancouver) knows how to fire a hunting rifle, I guess? Plus he's got a snowplow, which is great for running cars off the road if needed, or carrying bodies in the truck bed to the nearby gorge, a place where nobody's going to be visiting in the middle of winter. There may be some questions arising after the spring thaw, though.
I don't think this was intended as a comedy, not even a black comedy, but I found some odd comic elements in this story about a man named Kehoe's "Citizen of the Year" (for his tireless dedication to snow-plowing) going on a killing spree. There's a bit of a "Fargo"-like tone, because sometime the number and severity of the deaths creates a similar feeling. Nobody here ends up in a wood-chipper, but a few of the gangland deaths are similarly inventive.
It's a long climb up the criminal ladder to Trevor "Viking" Calcote, and since Coxman is basically coming out of nowhere, Calcote makes a few wrong guesses about who's taking out his low-level dealers. He assumes that the local Native American tribe, who had been granted rights to deal drugs in Kehoe years ago in an agreement with Viking's father, is behind it, and that starts a turf war, which Coxman is positioned to take advantage of, one young local cop is eager to investigate, and her partner (the grizzled veteran cop) is inclined to ignore.
Before long there are several factions all involved in a Rocky Mountain gang war, and it's all poised to come to a head, thanks to plans within plans, right outside the snowplow garage. Honestly, I still can't decide if this is a thrilling new entry in the crime genre or some kind of ridiculous parody of one. Maybe every viewer has to figure that out for themselves. There's plenty of room to make a prequel film or series based on this, but Neeson has stated publicly that this is his last action movie. Yeah, right - is he going to do musical comedy now? But there are actors out there that could play a young-Neeson type.
Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Tom Bateman (last seen in "Snatched"), Tom Jackson, Emmy Rossum (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Domenick Lombardozzi (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Julia Jones (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), John Doman (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), William Forsythe (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Raoul Max Trujillo (last seen in "Sicario; Day of the Soldado"), Benjamin Hollingsworth, Michael Eklund (last seen in "Mr. Right"), Bradley Stryker, Christopher Logan (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Nathaniel Arcand, Ben Cotton, Micheál Richardson (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Mitchell Saddleback, Manna Nichols, Arnold Pinnock (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Wesley MacInnes, Elysia Rotaru, Nicholas Holmes (last seen in "The Shack"), Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Aleks Paunovic (ditto), Elizabeth Thai, Gus Halper, Kyle Nobess, Glen Gould, Michael Bean (last seen in "Love Happens"), Nels Lennarson, Glenn Wrage.
RATING: 5 out of 10 fantasy football picks
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