Dir: Hans Petter Moland. Cast: Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Laura Dern, Emmy Rossum, John Doman, Domenick Lombardozzi, Arnold Pinnock, Raoul Trujillo, Ben Hollingsworth. 15 cert, 119 min

What a difference a fortnight makes. At the start of February, the frosty revenge thriller Cold Pursuit was ambling towards its release date; following the likes of Taken, it was just another entry in Liam Neeson’s dad-on-the-rampage subgenre. Now, it’s forever marked as the film that Neeson was promoting when he made an off-the-cuff confession about a racist vendetta.

It’s impossible to watch Cold Pursuit without the grim spectre of that story hovering about it, especially in the couple of scenes that Neeson shares with Arnold Pinnock, the lone black actor in the cast (playing a hapless hitman). Still, the ghoulishly cynical tone of this thing was never going to fly, not even as a set of basic popcorn thrills, let alone as some cautionary fable about the pitfalls of murderous rage.

It’s a remake of 2014’s Norwegian black comedy In Order of Disappearance, in which Stellan Skarsgård played a grieving snowplough driver called Nils Dickman, out to avenge the death of his son after an apparent heroin overdose. Neeson’s character is called Nelson Coxman – see what they did there? – and holds down the same job in the fictional American ski town of Kehoe. The reworking cracks on, conscience-free, with its identical premise, more concerned with seeming winkingly stylish and deadpan-callous, and getting the body count into double figures as briskly as it can.