Cold Pursuit

In the Colorado skiing community of Kehoe, stoic Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson) drives a gigantic snowplow, consistently clearing the roads, and earning the town’s highly respected “Citizen of the Year” award. When his son Kyle (Micheál Richardson, Neeson’s real-life son with the late Natasha Richardson), an airport baggage handler, is killed by drug-smugglers, his death is blamed on a heroin overdose. Disbelieving Coxman vows revenge, methodically eliminating one suspect after another until he reaches the real culprit, a Denver-based drug lord, Trevor “Viking” Calcote (Tom Bateman), who is battling his ex-wife (Julia Jones) for custody of their sensitive young son (Nicholas Holmes). There’s also a turf battle between Viking’s gang of thugs and a rival band of Native-American coke traffickers, headed by White Bull (Tom Jackson), along with the appearance of a hitman known as “The Eskimo.” In a thankless role, Laura Dern costars as Coxman’s weed-smoking wife, while Emmy Rossum and John Doman play a couple of local cops who are ill-equipped to handle the rapidly mounting count of homicide cases, and William Forsythe is a scene-stealer as Coxman’s black-sheep brother. Adapted from the Norwegian thriller In Order of Disappearance (2014) by its original director, Hans Petter Moland, who once again takes the helm here, this is a somber film that doesn’t match the thrills of Neeson’s Taken series. Optional. (S. Granger)