[10] After being awarded Citizen of the Year by the ski resort of Kehoe, Colorado, snowplow driver Nels Coxman's life is disrupted when his son dies from a forced heroin overdose, murdered by a Denver drug cartel.

Nels makes a sawed-off rifle, and kills three members of the cartel, Speedo, Limbo, and Santa, dumping their bodies over a nearby waterfall.

The cartel's drug lord, Trevor "Viking" Calcote, first suspects that these deaths are the work of his rival White Bull, a Ute with whom he has avoided conflict.

This drives White Bull to seek vengeance, and he orders his men to kidnap Viking's young son Ryan in retaliation, which starts a gang war.

Avalanche, one of White Bull's men, who had gone paragliding earlier, accidentally flies into the snowplow, being minced to death and shredded to bits.

The participation of actor Liam Neeson, director Hans Petter Moland and producers Michael Shamberg and StudioCanal in making the film, originally titled Hard Powder, was announced in January 2017.

[11] In March 2017, Domenick Lombardozzi, Emmy Rossum, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Laura Dern, William Forsythe, Julia Jones, and John Doman joined the cast of the film.

[2] In the United States and Canada, Cold Pursuit was released alongside What Men Want, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and The Prodigy, and was projected to gross $7–10 million from 2,630 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Cold Pursuit delivers the action audiences expect from a Liam Neeson thriller -- along with humor and a sophisticated streak that make this an uncommonly effective remake.

Chris Nashawaty, writing for Entertainment Weekly, delivered a positive review, grading it a "B+": If [Cold Pursuit] sounds like murder-by-numbers Liam Neeson Mad Libs, well, it kind of is.

It has the jokey, self-amused vibe of an Elmore Leonard novel or one of those arch, wannabe Tarantino knock-offs that sprouted up like toadstools in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and were quickly forgotten.

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.

[37]Richard Roeper, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, praised the film, awarding it 3.5 out of 4 stars:As characters with nicknames such as Sly and Mustang and Smoke and War Dog and Shiv and Drayno enter and often quickly exit the picture, Cold Pursuit moves forward with the assured and deliberate force of Nels' massive snowplow.

[citation needed] Liam Neeson was accused of racism after an interview with The Independent at a press junket for the film, published in February 2019.

Neeson said that the lesson of his experience was "to open up, to talk about these things", as there was still underlying "racism and bigotry" in both the United States and Northern Ireland.