Cold Pursuit: Liam Brings The Plough Factor…

Watch the trailer for Cold Pursuit and you could be forgiven for thinking, “Do we need another geri-actioner starring Liam Neeson on a roaring rampage of revenge?” Sure, it was fun and exhilarating in Taken, seeing Oskar Schindler crack skulls – after a career of gravel-throated gravitas, it represented one of the biggest star-rebrands since another mature actor with a similar-sounding name boarded Airplane! to leave grounded drama behind. But we’ve since had Taken 2 and 3, Non-Stop, Run All Night and The Commuter.

- Jamie Graham

The gimmick is beaten to a pulp, lifeless. Only Cold Pursuit is as much Point Blank-meets-Fargo as Liam’s latest trip to Hollywood Gym N Guns. And while it’s nowhere near as good as either John Boorman’s flinty revenge-thriller or the Coens’ black-humour-on-white-landscapes crime-com, it’s certainly better than its common-denominator trailer, off-the-peg title and hand-me-down premise would have you believe.

King of the Chill

We meet taciturn snowplough driver Nels Coxman (Neeson) as he’s named Citizen of the Year in Kehoe, a small ski-town nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, nearest city Denver. Nels’ speech makes a joke of how he’s chosen one road in life – “I’m just a guy who keeps a strip of civilisation open through the wilderness” – but he’ll soon be veering into unknown territory when his twenty-something son, Kyle (Micheál Richardson), is found dead of a heroin overdose.