Editor’s Note: Should you pay attention when director David Koepp asks you to pay attention? Freeline Media critic Mike Fried solves that riddle as he reviews Koepp’s latest film Cold Storage. Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
COLD STORAGE
3/5
David Koepp has been such a compelling screenwriter (especially of late) so when one of his title cards say “PAY ATTENTION: THIS SHIT IS REAL,” you’d better pay attention.
When Skylab crashed to the ground in 1979, supposedly most of the pieces went into the Indian Ocean. But what this Koepp guy would have you believe is that certain pieces landed otherwise, and people have been holding onto them as tourist attractions. However, it appears that they were sent up with microbial organisms that somehow mutated in space and which are now spreading and creating new organisms. The U.S. Government retrieves a sample from an Australian village which is then bombed, and the sample is placed in Cold Storage and forgotten. Until, that is, the facility is decommissioned and is resold as a storage facility. Two employees, Teacake and Naomi, find the sample behind some Sheetrock and all hell breaks loose.
Only Koepp can come up with shit like this – and that’s not a dig.
This is a terrifically derivative B-picture that owes a lot of its mojo to 1950s science fiction films as well as the oeuvre of George Romero. While it is a comedy first and foremost the reason it works is that the science behind how quickly the biological agent spreads seems absolutely real, especially after Covid.
Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) and Joe Keery (Stranger Things) are terrific as Naomi and Teacake (real name, Travis). They know they have stumbled onto something but they don’t know what. Liam Neeson is Major Robert Quinn, retired, who gets dragged out of retirement because an alert occurs and he is on an old outdated call list. And Liam Neeson basically plays Liam Neeson, but he’s funny Liam, especially when his back goes out.
Koepp’s screenplay, based on his 2019 novel, does a great job laying out how a pathogen that was discovered 20 years earlier still remains active and has infected a deer and the daddy of Naomi’s baby. And he has a fun time with his characters. Teacake/ Travis is smarter than he looks and Naomi is definitely smarter than Travis; they are good at following Quinn’s orders. The only problem is that their boss, Griffin, is a criminal and a moron who comes back with his fellow criminals and gets quickly infected.
Robert enlists Naomi and Travis to help him set off a low yield nuke. “You may have started the night as minimum wage guards but you’re a green light team now.” Only Liam Neeson can deliver this line straight-faced and have it be so funny.
What Jonny Campbell does with Koepp’s screenplay is really great. The film is 92 minutes long and is so quickly paced that it goes from start to finish before you know it.
Look for a nice cameo by Vanessa Redgrave as an elderly widow who comes to the storage facility to kill herself in her unit but who winds up killing one of the zombies. And Lesley Manville is terrific as Robert’s partner and fellow agent. And the always great Richard Brake is on hand as the Army Colonel who is dismissive of Quinn’s concerns.
I looked forward to this movie; it never played anywhere near me when it came out theatrically so I am glad I was finally glad to see it.
Is it a perfect movie? Far from it. There are a lot of logical gaps and presuppositions. But that’s not what the movie is about. It’s supposed to be fun.
And it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
