L'anti The Last Of Us ? - World Of Software

At the heart of a year saturated with licenses, reboots and remakes, Canal+ arrives with a unpublished story SF section. The studio partners with Jonny Campbell for the adaptation of the novel Cold Storage.

For the occasion, Liam Neeson returns to service alongside Joe Keery (Stranger Things) et Georgina Campbell (Barbarous). On the agenda: a very bad day for the two employees of a storage unit.

When a mutated, highly contagious microorganism escapes from an army laboratory, Teacake and Naomi are humanity’s only chance for survival. Only chance? Not really, since they can count on the help of agent Robert Quinn. We still have to arrive in time to get them out of this mess…

Entertainment (too) controlled

If the name of Jonny Campbell probably means nothing to you, that of screenwriter David Koepp is not unknown to science fiction fans. It is to him that Jurassic Park owes its story, adapted from the work of Michael Crichton.

Here, he is working on a story that he knows quite well, since he wrote it himself. A master’s degree at the service of a game-changing adventure?

From the first moments, we recognize the obvious know-how of the father of The Mummy et War of the Worlds. Whether it is to immortalize the appearance of a first health crisis or to present our heroes, Cold Storage knows how to do it and does not fall in his endeavor.

But now, everything is marked out, controlled… too much. Koepp and Campbell are fine connoisseurs and strive to reproduce all the mechanics tested by their elders. A classicism that could be beneficial to a purely nostalgic proposition, but which rings false when the film tries to thwart expectations with incidental stories.

Whether it’s the intrusion of a gang or the heroine’s boyfriend, the film always brushes aside its dramatic issues too quickly. Because he lacks Cold Storage the heart of what makes a good apocalyptic chronicle: the human.

The forgotten human

Joe Keery and Naomi Williams do their best to exist in this apocalyptic chronicle, but never face challenges insurmountable enough to have the opportunity to move, surprise or frighten us. The staid criminal and the mother do not exceed their status as archetypes of the genre.

With more room for maneuver, The Last of Us managed to make his duo the nerve center of his world. Ellie and Joel are constantly confronted with the excesses of a humanity which no longer has hope, must make immoral choices to survive.

Cold Storage Review Cinema2 — © Studio Canal

Here, it is the character of Liam Neeson, a retired agent, who embodies the idea of an end that justifies the means. He anticipated this crisis and will stop at nothing to prevent it from spreading across the world. He is at the epicenter of some funny scenes, some bravura bits.

Except that the film does not have the courage to follow through on its point and offer a more radical conclusion. The screenplay constantly touches on “the good idea” without fully grasping it. Because he is constantly navigating between two waters. It never crosses the border with pure gore, never with crazy comedy.

We would have been content with that, but the zombie register, whether it concerns spores or bites, has already done better. It has already offered more intense, more tense and funnier. We were probably asking too much of Cold Storage which had warned the public from its trailer, punctuated by the music of Daniel Powter: just “a bad day”.

Forgettable?

After a little over an hour and a half, we say to ourselves that Cold Storage will not leave an indelible impression. The fault lies in a rather conventional production despite the successful visual effects and some exciting transitions.

The insides of the storage unit would have benefited from being exploited by the camera, to do justice to the closed doors that it is trying to bring to light. The film will not dare to go further than what the viewer had anticipated.

Cold Storage is not a failure. It’s perhaps more frustrating than that: a technically solid film, but too careful to mark its era. We wonder if, like the organism that escaped from the laboratory, Cold Storage has not been thawed and reheated to invest a busy year in “licensed films”. We will remember from the session the obvious charisma of Joe Kerry, Neeson’s talent for playing old hands and some ingenious scenes.