Cold Pursuit (2019)

A snowplow driver in Kehoe, Colorado loses a son to a heroin overdose and begins working his way up a Denver cartel's org chart with a sawed-off rifle and a businesslike lack of ceremony. Hans Petter Moland, remaking his own Norwegian film with a bigger budget and a colder palette, keeps the whole affair at a low simmer of gallows humor. Bodies go over a waterfall in chicken wire. A black title card names each casualty. The film is self-amused in the manner of an Elmore Leonard paperback, and it never once stops to tell us what to think, which in this climate is nearly a novelty.

The cast carries more demographic weight than the genre usually bothers with. Tom Jackson and Julia Jones appear as Ute characters, and White Bull's gang functions as a genuine competing organization with its own grievances, its own dead son, and its own arc, though the screenplay treats the whole collision as turf and bloodline instead of commentary. Mustang, the right hand to the villain, mourns a male lover, and that grief redirects the war at a crucial moment. It is handled with a shrug, which is arguably the more interesting choice. Laura Dern exits early as the wife. Emmy Rossum's officer is competent and peripheral. Nobody delivers a speech.

What we have, then, is a revenge picture that declines to lecture, declines to moralize about money, and declines to notice the mountains as anything but scenery. The violence is personal, the politics incidental, the snow merely cold. It is a film that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for the modest company it keeps. Refreshing, in its limited way. Also forgettable, in the same way, and probably within a week. A B minus of a movie, and content to be one.