A whole can of worms.” That’s how Liam Neeson describes what his character discovers in Hans Petter Moland’s blisteringly violent — and bitingly hilarious — COLD PURSUIT.
“My character goes out on a path of vengeance, but doesn’t realise what he’s getting himself into,” says Neeson. “He thinks he’s going after one guy who killed his son. Then it escalates into a whirlwind of vengeance and violence. And it all has this grain of dark humor running through it.”
This twisted revenge story swirls around Neeson’s Nels Coxman, a snowplow driver in the Colorado ski resort of Kehoe. Just named Citizen of the Year for his services in keeping the roads open to the remote town, Coxman’s life swiftly spirals into amateur retribution and an escalating pile of corpses when his son (played by Micheál Richardson) is mistakenly killed by local gangsters over a stash of missing drugs. All Nels knows about killing people is what he’s read in crime novels, but to find out what happened to his son, Coxman sets off with a sawn-off hunting rifle — and unwittingly sets off a chain of events that will include a snowbound turf war, kidnapping, two rival crime lords, and violent run-ins with an array of colorful hoodlums.
Comparisons to classic Coen brothers movies – Fargo, in particular – greeted Hans Petter Moland’s original Norwegian film, In Order Of Disappearance, starring Stellan Skarsgård, when it opened to rave reviews and massive global box office in 2014. Other fans drew parallels to the depth and wit of dialogue of early Quentin Tarantino films. But while Moland is “obviously delighted” to have his work placed in those two ballparks, for him, he has his own unique style with his inspiration going back further to the films of another filmmaker known for walking the edge of darkness. “I grew up loving the films of Billy Wilder,” says Moland of the beloved and Oscar®-winning director of Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment. “I loved their darkness and their gallows humor, that great balance between the two. So when I was offered the chance to remake In Order Of Disappearance, this time in English, I took it.”
The idea to have Moland remake his own film came from producer Michael Shamberg, whose credits include Pulp Fiction, Out Of Sight and Get Shorty, among many others, and knows a fresh crime movie when he sees one. “The best part of my career has been working with singularly talented people,” says Shamberg. “When I saw In Order Of Disappearance, it had everything. And COLD PURSUIT has the same punch. Audiences will be emotionally invested in the characters, satisfied with it as an action film, and also be surprised by how funny it is. It’s a film where that balance has to be just right, and that’s why Hans Petter had to be the one to do it. And in the center of it all is the wonderful Liam Neeson, who brings his classic ‘man-of-action’ persona to the film — and then delightfully goes in a new direction with it.”
It’s also a story about multiple other twistedly complex characters, including two other fathers that Nels slams into. The first is Trevor Calcote, AKA “Viking,” a psychotic local drug lord played by Tom Bateman (costar of Murder on the Orient Express and Snatched). The second is White Bull, played by legendary Canadian actor and folk singer Tom Jackson, who brings a soulful gravitas to the role of a rival boss who runs a cabal of tough Native American gangsters – guys as deadpan as they are deadly – with a
3
dignity and coolness. “These are all bad guys. There are no good guys in this movie. So you have to start there, and then decipher, ‘Well, how bad is that guy?’” says Jackson of a conflict that ends with lots of blood spilled across white snow and which he says recalls films like The Wild Bunch.