Liam Neeson might make the same movie every year, but it's not the same same movie, if that makes sense (it doesn't - ed). He plays gruff older dudes put in bad situations, but they're not (exactly) the same dudes, and they're definitely not the same situations - The Commuter and Cold Pursuit have almost nothing in common beside Neeson and a body count, and the Taken movies are a different thing entirely again. His movies seem the same from a distance because they all scratch the same itch: the desire to see a bunch of chumps get what's coming to them.
So on that scale, this is a winner all round. Nils Coxman (Neeson) is a snow plow operator in a small ski resort town who, despite his taciturn nature, pretty much has it all (he's even been awarded citizen of the year). Then his son is found dead, seemingly of a drug overdose, and while Nils' wife (Laura Dern) is clearly shattered, Nils seems to be holding it together - until he goes out to the shed to kill himself.
He's all set to pull the trigger when he learns that his son's death was no accident: he was murdered by a drug cartel after he and a buddy made off with a (relatively minor) amount of product. This is a Liam Neeson movie in 2019, so we all know what that means. Soon drug dealers start turning up dead - or more exactly, not turning up dead, as Nils takes their bodies, wraps them in chicken wire, and dumps them in a frozen river (the chicken wire means the fish can get at them to eat the flesh - he read it in a crime novel).
The cartel, led by a smug wealthy upper middle-class jerk nicknamed Viking (Tom Bateman) take note of their missing underlings, and leap to completely the wrong conclusion, blaming a rival group of Native American drug dealers. Soon Nils doesn't have to do much at all to keep the body count rising, but as the corpses stack up, eventually someone's going to figure out who started it all.
Director Hans Petter Moland is adapting his own earlier work here, having previously told this story in the 2014 Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, so he has a pretty good idea of where the laughs are. It's not quite up there with the Coen Brothers but it shares something of their dark sense of humour: the rapid demise of numerous characters (each one's passing is marked by a black title card) develops into the film's most reliable punchline, to the point where actually showing the people being killed becomes beside the point.
That's not to say that this doesn't have its share of violence; at one point a severed head makes a memorable appearance, and various examples of snow plowing equipment prove lethal in Nils' hands. But the dark humour gives the deadly hijinks a dimension beyond the usual body count, pushing it closer in tone to an Elmore Leonard adaptation than one of Neeson's grimmer kill-fests.
But this is still a Liam Neeson film. He hasn't served up a dud for a while (Taken 3 maybe?) and for an actor currently specalising in a fairly limited oeuvre he's doing a remarkably solid job of keeping it fresh. Anyone who's plowed through Charles Bronson's 80s work knows that's a pretty impressive achievement; whatever you might think of the kind of films he makes, it's hard to deny that - bungled interviews aside - he's doing something right.
- Anthony Morris
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