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You might have seen the trailer for Cold Storage the other day. I don’t know about you, but I thought it looked like a good laugh. It is now on VoD, so I watched it this weekend. Sadly, it’s not as funny as I hoped.
Cold Storage stars Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Rob Collins, Sosie Bacon, Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Brake, and Liam Neeson. Jonny Campbell directs, with David Koepp writing.
The Story
The story for Cold Storage has been done to death, but solid:
When a highly dangerous fungus escapes from a secret laboratory, a former bioterrorism agent is called back into action. Alongside two young employees, he must confront an invisible and out-of-control threat.
The movie opens in space in 1979, where flash cards tell us a space station blew up and ended up on Earth, but it was not alone. Another flash card then says:
Pay attention, this shit is real.
It was something like that, and I thought I was in for some laughs. I will come back to this later.
Part of the meteor lands in a small area in Australia. Neeson turns up, with some other people, and finds a ‘green sludge’. One of them gets infected, and then kills herself, which was weird. Again, I’ll come back to that later.
They blow the town up and take the ‘green sludge’ and store it in a hidden location in the US.
Present day, the location ends up as a storage facility for regular people, you know, those places you can store crap you can’t bear to get rid of. The sludge is hidden there and hidden from the public, hiding in plain sight.
The Plot Has To Happen
We then meet Teacake (Keery), who works at the storage place. While working, he hears a beeping sound and cannot figure out where it’s coming from. Naomi (Campbell) is also working in the same place.
The two of them track down the beeping sound, only to find a hidden area, where the ‘green sludge’ is. We learn that the facility is starting to break down, and the sludge gets out. Then, all hell breaks loose and Neeson turns up to save the day. I won’t spoil the rest of the story, it’s interesting enough, but that’s not the problem with Cold Storage.
The Cast
The cast is all good enough in this. I feel for Keery, as he’s a little typecast from Stranger Things. No amount of blonde hair dye will get the Steve Harrington out of him.
Campbell is good in this as well; she’s funny, has a good sense of timing, and is very easy on the eye.
Sorry, but I’m going to say this: Neeson cannot do comedy. I will give him his cameo in Life’s Too Short, but that’s about it. In this, there are moments he’s being ‘funny’. There was one moment I laughed with him in the movie, that was it.
A ‘Funny’ Comedy
The trailer for Cold Storage was sold as a comedy, a really funny comedy, but it isn’t that funny. Honestly, the funniest moments are in the trailer; the rest of it is plot. It can’t decide if it wants to be a ‘laugh out loud’ comedy or a sci-fi horror.
As I said in the opening, the opening flash card, which says ‘this shit is real’, gets blasted by a piece of the space station. This gave me the impression that the comedy was going to be like Airplane or Naked Gun (the good one, not the Neeson one). There are funny moments in the movie, but tonally, it’s all over the place.
Going by the trailer, I thought there was going to be a laugh-a-minute. After watching Cold Storage, I giggled about four times. The rest of it was trying to be a horror movie.
Overall
Cold Storage is kinda fun, but you need to lower your expectations. It’s not a hilarious comedy; it’s mildly amusing.
I said that the story is solid enough, but that’s about it. Then there is the devil in the details. At the beginning of the movie, one of the team members gets infected and then shoots themselves. In the rest of the movie, the green stuff spends all its time trying to infect everyone else.
They might have been a reason for this, but it wasn’t explained. I don’t need everything spelt out in a movie like this, but if something like that is just confusing. Again, there’s no need to overthink it, but put some effort in.
Laugh, or I’ll shoot you!
I’m giving Cold Storage a 2 out of 5. It’s mildly amusing, and it passed a couple of hours, but I won’t be going back anytime soon.
Cold Storage is now on VoD, but I suggest you wait till streaming.
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