Metacritic reviews

Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.

It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, but that doesn’t stand in the way of it goosing its bloodbath set pieces with irreverent, off-kilter gallows humor.

By pumping up the darkly comedic undertones, augmenting the frigid chill of the original, Moland’s terrific, riveting noir-tinged picture distinguishes itself from other rote, reductive remakes.

Cold Pursuit is partly a great action thriller, and Liam Neeson is still kicking plenty of butt, but the film is mostly an intriguing, relaxing, totally tuckered-out character study of old men running out of the energy required to run a criminal enterprise. As thrillers go, this one is more adult than your average.

There is nary a moment of death that isn’t drawn out for laughs, or a moment of comedy drawn out for sorrow. Among the ice and the wind, Cold Pursuit paints an unsuspecting, desolate place, where death doesn’t care about you, so you might as well laugh.

One thing that does translate is Morland’s extremely dry, extremely dark sense of humor, which manifests at the bleakest moments of the story like whoopee cushions lining the pews at a funeral.

The little beats throughout Cold Pursuit are distinctive enough to cover for this gory caper’s periodic misfires.

While director Hans Petter Moland’s remake of his own film “In Order of Disappearance” (Frank Baldwin adapts the original screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson) may fall short of its goals, it’s hard not to admire the film’s ambitions — and certain scenes, performances and even one-liners — even as its flaws start piling up.

This English-language remake of In Order Of Disappearance by its Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland doesn’t particularly succeed as a thriller, but the film’s gleeful perversity at refusing to satisfying genre conventions gives it a scruffy integrity all the same.

The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of Cold Pursuit, which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie.