MovieMonday: Cold Pursuit

This movie opens as all revenge movies do, with a good man (or woman) driven to the limit.

In this case, the man is Nels (Liam Neeson), who speaks little but drives a really really big snowplow through the Colorado mountains.  And he's modest:  "I'm just a guy who keeps a strip of civilization open," he says.  He also receives a citizen-of-the-year award from his town, a ski resort.

Then some bad guys -- drug dealers, natch -- bring a shipment to town on a private jet and, apparently without provocation, kill Nels' son, Kyle (Neeson's own son, actor Micheál Richardson) by injecting him to the point of overdose and dropping his body at an outdoor cafe in Denver.

Nels is gripped first by despair and then by rage.  He vows to take out every member of the drug gang, bottom to top, and makes a pretty good start on the project.

Then the plot veers off in other directions.  Turns out the Denver-based drug kingpin, a guy known as Viking (Tim Bateman), and his minions are fighting with a Native American drug gang for territory.   There's a long, not very credible story about how this animus arose, but it takes us to the point where Viking's thugs kill the son of White Bull (Tom Jackson), the Native American paterfamilias who wants Viking's son killed as revenge.

Viking, like Nels and White Bear, is a loving father.  He is also persnickety, taking time away from planning violent hits to order his estranged wife to feed their school-age child a very specific, very healthy diet.

Then it's off to the races or the snow plows or whatever.  The action shifts from Nels vs. Viking to team White Bear vs. team Viking.  If you can get past the gore of it all, it's pretty funny with amusing asides about a mismatched team of police officers,  the native enforcers playing at a white man's ski resort and Nels' brother's odd life and travails.

Call it a revenge movie, but with many exaggerated characters around the edges.   This seems intended to convince the audience that the whole thing is a big goof and not a Tarantino-esque shoot-em-up.

In fact, this film has been made before.  The earlier version was "In Order of Disappearance," a popular 2014 Norwegian movie, that, from the look of its trailer, included all the same plot points and included all the humorous distractions.  That film's director, Hans Petter Moland, directed this American version.

In short, the movie is wacky and worth a watch.  But I have one question.

If Liam Neeson's character spends his days and nights plowing furrows in mountains frosted with deep snow and attending funerals in icy cemeteries, why doesn't he wear gloves or a hat or at least zip up his parka?


Revenge Stories: A Brief and Selective History  

Stories where good people (or gods) seek revenge have been popular since at least the time of Homer, whose  "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are full of such themes.

This is not difficult to understand.   A boiling rage and the urge to act on it inspire writers and playwrights and musicians and actors.

Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is his most famous vengeance play.  Almost 400 years later, Disney released a more kid-friendly treatment of the same idea with "The Lion King."

Giuseppe Verdi composed three operas around the theme -- "Aida," "La Traviata," and "Rigoletto."  Georges Bizet gave us "Carmen."   There must be many others.

If children still read adventure books (a big if,) then "The Count of Monte Cristo" is still a popular title as well as the subject of three or four films.  There also are innumerable children's movies about teaching bullies their well-deserved lessons.

There are women's revenge movies, including "Carrie," "Nine to Five," and "Kill Bill."    There is a 70-year-old Bergman revenge film, "Virgin Spring," that still is studied in film classes.

Here in the US, the revenge film seems to have become the province of middle-aged actors who are cast as family men enraged by violence done to their wives and/or children.  Think Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and, for the last decade or so, Liam Neeson.

MovieMonday: The Commuter

This film is a nice piece of work, the sort of thing Liam Neeson has been doing in recent years.  Its genre is action/thriller and, by its own lights, it hangs together well. I found it perfectly satisfying.

The setup is this:  Michael MacCauley, an NYPD detective turned life insurance salesman, is "let go" after 10 years on the job.  On the Metro-North train from Grand Central Terminal back to his Tarrytown home he is given an assignment/opportunity by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga.) She offers him a payoff of $100,000 cash if he does as she asks.  Since his family's financial situation is perilous, he begins to investigate.

 As events progress, Michael learns that his movements are being observed and that the offered "opportunity" is not optional.  If he does not do as he has been told, his family, other passengers and railroad workers face unpleasant consequences.  Unnerved but professional, Michael investigates the situation in a credible way.  The level of threat increases in steady increments as Michael races against a tight deadline: the moment when the train makes its stop at the Cold Springs station.

If you have seen even a single movie of this type, you will not be surprised to learn that a broad network of corruption and evil underlies the danger Michael faces.  It's a movie, after all, not realistic but inhabiting a realistic-looking world.  

There are many scary moments.  Michael discovers the body of a dead FBI agent and watches a fellow passenger sacrificed to make a point.  He tangles with various other passengers while trying to identify the person of interest to the mysterious woman. 

There is violence, including some explosions toward the end, but less gunplay than we have grown accustomed to seeing in modern film and no sci-fi plot devices.  For these exclusions alone, I appreciated it.


Note

In addition to having the usual implausible plot, the film reveals that its screenwriters don't know much about real life.  A few points:

--Insurance salesmen don't have to travel into New York City to sell term life policies to family people.  The family people, like Michael MacCauley, live mostly in suburbs.

--Sixty-year-old guys who commute on trains don't read "Wuthering Heights," and they don't talk with other old guys about which of the Bronte sisters -- Emily or Charlotte -- wrote the book.  

--The movie tells us that Michael MacCauley lost his career NYPD gig because of cutbacks after the 2008 crash (contra the usual public employment policy of last-in, first-out.)   "But the bankers of Wall Street got rich," he commiserates resentfully with an old friend.  There is the obligatory scene in which he gives the finger to an arrogant Goldman Sachs guy in a three-piece suit.  (And no, I don't know anybody who works at Goldman.)
      This theme has passed its sell-by date.  With all due respect to Bernie Sanders, Wall Street is not the nexus of evil that it was in days past.  Financial employment dropped by 500,000 jobs between 2008 and 2013 and has continued to drop since then.  Regulation has increased substantially, and stupid banks -- Wells, Citi, UBS, etc. -- are being held to account.  We may wish that Angelo Mozilo had gone to prison, but the fact that he did not is likely because federal insiders protected him.
      Some better candidates for modern-day greedy bad guys are tech billionaires under the age of 40 -- the ones who collect and sell our data, who maintain sloppy protection systems that expose us to hacks, who wipe out established industries, who innovate new ways to evade regulation and who seem to include a large number of horndogs.  
       I'm just trying to be helpful here.