It’s not just star Liam Neeson who, following snow-plough crash of a promotional interview, is currently looking like an unwelcome relic from a bygone era. The whole tone of this glib black comedy, with its cartoon bad guys and conspiratorial wink with each addition to the body count, seems rather dated.
It’s the kind of severed-tongue-in-cheek movie that got greenlit in droves in the 1990s by financiers looking to tap into the crime-irony sweetspot occupied by Quentin Tarantino.
But although the film has a setting and a genre that is undeniably American, the roots of this project are in Scandinavia. Director Hans Petter Moland has remade his own Norwegian original, In Order of Disappearance, transposing the action from northern Europe to the snowbound Rocky mountains. Many of the key ingredients are lifted wholesale – revenge; striking shots of blood spurting on to snow; the creatively grisly use of heavy machinery; face-crunching sound design.
But while the Norwegian version starred Stellan Skarsgård, an actor who manages to bring a soulful quality and pathos to even the most ludicrously extreme acts of violence, as the “citizen of the year” turned vigilante, the remake is just Liam Neeson reprising his tired Taken shtick at a lower temperature.
