Cold Pursuit (15)
Verdict: Violent and misconceived
Rating:
Cold Pursuit is about revenge. You might have followed the brouhaha that erupted when its star, Liam Neeson, admitted in an interview to publicise the film that he once sought vengeance in real life, prowling the streets seeking to attack a black man — any black man — after a friend was raped by a dark-skinned assailant.
This admission would count as the biggest misjudgment of Neeson's illustrious career were it not for a bigger one: accepting the lead in Cold Pursuit.
It must have seemed like easy money; yet another wearily familiar role for him as a father bent on tracking down the villains who have wrecked his happy family life.
Cold Pursuit, starring Liam Neeson, is all about revenge. It's a deeply unpleasant picture, all the more offensive for its veneer of comedy, stretched ever-more thinly over a carnival of brutality
But this isn't a new take on the increasingly preposterous Taken films. It's a deeply unpleasant picture, all the more offensive for its veneer of comedy, stretched ever-more thinly over a carnival of brutality.
Humour and homicide have always rubbed along well in movies; almost 60 years separate two great examples, the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), and Martin McDonagh's deliciously dark In Bruges (2008).
But the writing and plotting have to be spot on. When they are as clunky as this, the attempts at whimsy seem desperately forced.
In Cold Pursuit, the name of the victim appears on screen after each murder, under a cross (or in one case a Star of David).
The long-running TV drama Six Feet Under used exactly the same device, but there it worked perfectly. Here it just feels laboured.
Cold Pursuit is director Hans Petter Moland's remake of his own 2014 Norwegian film, In Order Of Disappearance.
Neeson, admitted in an interview to publicise the film that he once sought vengeance in real life, prowling the streets seeking to attack a black man — any black man — after a friend was raped by a dark-skinned assailant
Neeson plays Nelson Coxman, a humble snowplough driver who for no remotely explicable reason lives in a $2 million house overlooking the ski resort of Kehoe, Colorado.
Laura Dern plays his loving wife, but not for long. She has the good fortune to walk out of his life, and out of the script, when Coxman metamorphoses from solid citizen to ruthless vigilante after the sudden death of his son from an apparent heroin overdose.
Coxman doesn't buy that explanation, and duly begins to dispatch one drug-dealer after another in a variety of blood-splattered ways.
Neeson, a fine actor with a high threshold for poor material, plays it straight throughout.
His character carries out killings and disposes of bodies with such chilling efficiency you would swear he was the world's greatest assassin in a former career.
But no. He just likes crime novels. And frowning. If they gave out Oscars for furrowed brows, Neeson would be a six-time winner.
When Coxman does overlook the need for discretion, blasting one baddie to death in a bridal shop, in broad daylight, with a shotgun, nobody up to and including the Kehoe police department pays the slightest attention.
Like the corpses, the clichés begin to pile up. There are a couple of cops and — guess what? One is a jaded veteran, the other an eager rookie.
Coxman, meanwhile, unwittingly ignites a feud between two local cartels, one run by Native Americans, the other by a parody of a sociopathic drug lord, who, when not ordering hits, obsesses about the e-numbers his young son is consuming.
This is meant to be funny. It's not. All the gangsters have silly nicknames. That's not funny, either.
The son moves centre stage when the Native Americans try to kidnap him, but Coxman abducts him first, awakening his fatherly instincts.
Happily, the boy doesn't mind being snatched, or should I say taken, by this frowning snowplough driver.
That's the kind of movie this is — one that doesn't respect its audience enough to inject its narrative with the vaguest believability. So why anoint it with even one star?
Well, the snowy scenery is lovely. And there's some terrific music, although why it marries Brass In Pocket by The Pretenders to a blizzardy corpse-disposal scene is anybody's guess.
On The Basis Of Sex
Verdict: Worthy Biopic
Rating: 
The choice of music in On The Basis Of Sex is questionable, too. A jaunty soundtrack doesn't always fit this likeable film's remit.
This is to tell the true story of how brilliant Brooklyn-born law professor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (splendidly played by Felicity Jones), who had herself been forever thwarted on account of her gender, helped to overturn routine sex discrimination enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
She did this with her lawyer husband Martin (Armie Hammer) by championing, in 1970, the case of a Denver man refused a tax deduction for the nurses he needed to help him care for his aged mother.
