A few years back, when I heard they were making a new Naked Gun movie, well… I thought it was a terrible idea. I love the originals, but without Leslie Nielsen or the ZAZ (David Zucker, Jeff Abrahams and Jerry Zucker) creative team, I just didn’t think the series’ unabashed silliness and nonstop battery of jokes could be recaptured nowadays. The only thing that gave me the slightest bit of hope about the film was the news that Liam Neeson was going to be the lead. And the reason I thought that might work was because I remembered a movie I’d seen just a couple of years prior: Hans Petter Moland’s action-thriller Cold Pursuit.
The movie takes place in the ski resort town of Kehoe, Colorado, a remote, snowbound setting that would be completely inaccessible if not for its dutiful snowplow driver Nels Coxman (Neeson), who keeps the town’s sole access road clear for tourists. Coxman is a quiet, humble guy with a bit of a stoic disposition and a deep commitment to his community. But when his son is killed for stealing some drugs from a Denver-based crime syndicate, Coxman goes on a rampage, killing every member of the criminal organization one by one. His ultimate target: the boss, a pedantic, cold-blooded murderer nicknamed “Viking.”
If the name Cold Pursuit doesn’t ring a bell, I don’t blame you. Back in 2019, Neeson’s three Taken movies were still in recent memory, along with a handful of other movies that just looked like Taken with slightly altered premises, like The Commuter and Honest Thief. It was probably easy to assume that Cold Pursuit, which was mostly advertised as a straight thriller, was just another Taken copycat casting Neeson as a specially-trained badass who’s really good at seeking vengeance. Cold Pursuit, however, has much more in common with a black comedy like the Coen brothers’ 1996 movie Fargo than it does with the self-serious Taken films.
To be clear, Cold Pursuit isn’t a parody of action thrillers. Its premise and plotting would work perfectly well without the humor. Instead, it’s a self-aware thriller, much like the film it’s a remake of, Moland’s 2014 Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance starring Stellan Skarsgård as the similarly suggestively-named Nils Dickman. Moland and screenwriter Frank Baldwin (as well as the original film’s writer Kim Fupz Aakeson), know that life in these kinds of movies is cheap, so why not have a laugh at their expense? While Cold Pursuit is never quite as funny as Fargo, nor does it offer anything as shockingly memorable as the woodchipper scene, the snowy setting and the casual nature of death make for a good, if obvious, comparison.
Hell, even the name Cold Pursuit is a punny take on the phrase “hot pursuit.”
While Cold Pursuit’s premise is about as heavy as it gets, there’s a bleak, wry sense of humor about the film that becomes clearer as more bodies pile up. For example, each of the syndicate members has some sort of silly gangster name, like “Speedo,” “Limbo,” and “Santa.” As Coxman kills each one, the film memorializes them with a title card with their name and code name. While that isn’t laugh-out-loud funny the first time, as the bodies pile up and their names get ever more ridiculous, the running gag becomes increasingly hilarious, especially after the bloody finale.
Even the death of Coxman’s son, which kicks off the central story, is presented with a bit of comedy. As the coroner presents the boy’s corpse to his parents, the mechanical bed takes way too long to rise into the frame of the camera, sucking all the seriousness out of the scene for the audience. The characters don’t know they’re in a dark comedy, though, so for them, the scene remains utterly tragic.
Neeson himself best embodies the movie’s tone: He’s a grim character completely unaware of the humorous way Moland is presenting these horrors. Even when he’s shooting a man or cornering them on a snowbound road with his gigantic snowplow, he remains as straight-faced as he does in any of his thrillers — maybe even more so. That’s the perfect tone to take with the comedy.
Even in his funniest scenes, he doesn’t crack. For example, there’s a scene where he tells his brother that he’s killed three members of a crime syndicate, then wrapped their bodies in chicken wire and tossed them in a river so the bodies will be eaten by fish and won’t resurface, the way they would if encased in plastic bags. When his brother asks him where he came up with such an idea, Coxman shrugs and innocently delivers the punchline, “I read it in a crime novel.” Much later, when Coxman kidnaps Viking’s son, the kid insists that Coxman read him a bedtime story. Eventually, Coxman relents and reads the kid an instruction manual for a snowblower.
Neeson’s straight-faced seriousness in Cold Pursuit is precisely why I knew he was the right guy to take over for Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun. As Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker have always insisted regarding their comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, the characters’ seriousness is what sells their style of comedy. There’s no winking at the camera to “be funny.” The world of The Naked Gun is funny and full of jokes, but the characters are completely unaware of the absurdity of their reality. The ZAZ movies’ signature humorlessness enhances the comedy by offering contrast.
And to my delight, when I went to see the new Naked Gun last year, I found out I’d been completely wrong in thinking this brand of humor couldn’t be revived. The new movie nails that sense of comedy with a rapidfire barrage of jokes, and what holds it all together is the deadly serious Liam Neeson as Detective Frank Drebin Jr..
To be fair to Neeson, he’s always had a sense of humor about himself. His Good Cop/Bad Cop character in The Lego Movie is clearly a parody of his other work, as is his hilarious appearance on the Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant comedy series Life’s Too Short, where he plays a humorless version of himself.
Cold Pursuit, though, is Neeson playing it completely straight for an entire film, without ever mugging for the camera to let the audience know he’s in on the joke. While much of that comes down to tone, writing and direction, Neeson’s comedic sense — especially when the joke is on him — is more attuned than people might expect from a guy whose biggest blockbusters have been mostly humorless films about him kicking ass.
Cold Pursuit is available for streaming on Peacock Premium Plus and to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV and YouTube.
