Cold Pursuit
“Cold Pursuit stumbles in its exploration of how Native Americans are treated in the United States.”
Title: Cold Pursuit (2019)
Director: Hans Petter Moland 👨🏼🇳🇴
Writers: Screenplay by Frank Baldwin 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the movie Kraftidioten (2014) written by Kim Fupz Aakeson 👨🏼🇩🇰
Reviewed by John Manuel Arias 👨🏽🇺🇸🇨🇷🌈♿
Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.
Technical: 3/5
Cold Pursuit sells its action thriller DNA through gangster negotiations, gun fights, and grisly murders. However, as the film finds its footing, it adopts an unexpected sense of gallows humor that borders on camp. Such exaggerated performances give the sense that Cold Pursuit must have been a lot of fun to make. However, Cold Pursuit arrives at its punchline a little too late.
This shows up through poor pacing. The film starts off as a cookie-cutter revenge thriller: Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson)’s son dies in sketchy circumstances, fishy enough that our snowplow driver protagonist goes asking questions. The answers of said questions lead him—of course—to a murder spree that somehow turns this upright citizen into a professional assassin overnight. Because why not?
Midway into the second act, though, the movie seems to become self-aware. Cue cards with the name of each villain are introduced after each death. The archetype of a cool-headed, ruthless mob boss is swapped out for the “Viking” (Tom Bateman), a trust-fund kingpin who grows increasingly petulant the further Nels gets. And tongue-in-cheek nods toward race seem to fish for laughs but only befuddle, at best.
Despite these issues, however, the movie does manage to be fun. In Tarantino-esque style, dialogue and violence become increasingly cartoonish. But unlike in a Tarantino flick, the cast of characters never really catch up. Those populating Cold Pursuit feel either too superficial or worse, reduced to gender and racial stereotypes. Although the film appears to condemn and reclaim these tropes, the fact that this “reclamation” takes place with no authentic representation among its director or writers makes its themes feel like an overreach.
Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
Yes, there are indeed women in this movie. And yes, there are indeed different ethnicities of women, including Native women, Asian women, Jewish women. (And Laura Dern, as Nels’ wife Grace Coxman.) Grace peaces out midway through the film, dodging a narrative bullet that by the end of the movie, everyone else likely wishes they would have had the chance to, as well.
The center of the universe for every woman in this movie is men. Grace and Aya, played by Native actor Julia Jones, are concerned only with their sons and not-great husbands. Elizabeth Thai, who is Vietnamese, is reduced to a cringey stereotype—playing a former nail salon worker who is saved by a rich white gangster. Through the film, she berates him in a heavy-handed accent, falling into a Dragon Lady cliché. Emmy Rossum steps into the too-spacious shoes of Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo (1996), i.e. a lady-cop in a secluded, Podunk town who is smarter than all of the men around her combined. But, alas, McDormand’s character had an entire movie to develop, while Rossum has about three total minutes of screen time. The men behind Cold Pursuit simply lack the creative range to make these women believable, multi-dimensional, and above all, human.
Race: 3.5/5
This is where the movie gets tricky. Its jokey self-awareness treats race relations with too much irreverence, especially knowing that the film’s white creators are telling stories outside of their own lived experience.
For starters, every single man of color that shows up onscreen is a criminal. To be fair, every single white man is a criminal too, which the filmmakers probably intended to nullify the argument. And it works, to a degree: When the Viking sneers and shouts racial epithets through gritted teeth, some of the comments are so outlandish that they make him the butt of the joke.
But Cold Pursuit stumbles in its exploration of how Native Americans are treated in the United States. No amount of satire changes the fact that one of the film’s gangs is composed entirely of Native American men. Sure, their violence is comedic rather than gruesome, and their characters feel likeable enough that they’re not completely reduced to the “savage” stereotype Hollywood is often quick to turn to. But tackling a Native trope by merely satirizing that same trope feels half-assed, especially given the lack of representation behind the lens.
Thanks to the actors though, some scenes that critique colonialism do land well. For instance, the gang leader White Bull (Tom Jackson) inspects clothing in a store with a Native American print, only for the label to read “Made in China.” In another scene, a white concierge denies the group of Native men a room because they do not have a reservation, to which they sardonically accuse her of telling them to “go back to the reservation.” The white guilt that flashes across her face is priceless.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.50
The Viking has two henchmen who hide a romance, one that’s revealed out of the blue when they share a quick and passionate kiss in a bullet-proof SUV. But one of them is so mouthy to his boss that you know from the get-go he’s going to die—and indeed, he’s sacrificed in an effort to appease the White Bull’s gang after a misunderstanding. Grieving his lover, the Viking’s right-hand man double-crosses him, which leads everyone to a bloodbath and to the Viking’s dramatic death. So the film gets a slight boost for this morsel of gay revenge.
Mediaversity Grade: C 3.33/5
At its most literal definition, Cold Pursuit is diverse. Unfortunately, it makes no effort to challenge sexism and its attempts to satirize racism fall short. The audience leaves with the feeling that maybe they weren’t laughing along with the movie, but rather at it.
Like Cold Pursuit? Try these other revenge stories.
Promising Young Woman (2020)
The Foreigner (2017)
The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)