True confession: Given the hornet’s nest and subsequent fallout stirred up by Liam Neeson’s recent interview comments about his real-life fantasies of vengeance after his friend was raped almost 40 years ago, there’s no way to sanely write about Cold Pursuit. Except to simply review the movie apart from the firestorm currently raging around its star.

So, back before the ongoing uproar, I’m going to step up and say that Cold Pursuit had me at the very idea of Neeson playing a snowplow driver. Named Nels Coxman, no less. But right from the movie’s opening—quoting Oscar Wilde—this icy-hot, darkly jokey, preposterous vengeance thriller neither misses a bloodthirsty trick nor a chance for eliciting intentionally nasty, gonzo belly laughs.

Happily, this isn’t yet another tiresome do-over of Neeson’s cottage industry of super-serious grieving-dad flicks typified by the surprise hit Taken. Cold Pursuit is, in fact, an absurdist snowbound blast. Director Hans Petter Moland—armed with a shrewd, quippy script by Frank Baldwin (Kim Fupz Aakeson wrote the original)—takes his own Order of Disappearance, a wryly funny 2014 Norwegian vigilante potboiler starring Stellan Skarsgard, and significantly ups the silliness level.

Neeson plays a taciturn, good man—a newly crowned “Citizen of the Year”—who faithfully plows the routes around an isolated Colo. ski resort. Reeling from the heroin-induced murder of his airport baggage-handler son (Michael Richardson, Neeson’s actual son) by drug-cartel slime buckets, our Norwegian hero not only goes bonkers but also somehow brings out his inner special-ops chops. His marriage to wife (Laura Dern in a glorified cameo) buckles under the strain of their shared grief, and she promptly leaves him. He considers shotgunning his brain to smithereens. But he reconsiders and instead goes on to wreak havoc in a highly stylized, sadistic, payback-driven killing spree.

Happily, this isn’t yet another tiresome do-over of Neeson’s cottage industry of super-serious grieving-dad flicks typified by the surprise hit Taken.

The jokey bloodletting—we’re guessing that director Moland digs Tarantino—could disgust some, delight others. Or both. The high spirits of the movie are typified by the clownishly monstrous villain of the piece, a persnickety Denver-based crime lord known as “Viking.” (Tom Bateman plays him to the hilt). Viking constantly nitpicks his estranged wife (Julia Jones) and bullies his son (Nicholas Holmes) for not reading Lord of the Flies and eating too much sugar.

This father-son theme gets further exploited with the introduction of a rival Native American drug gang, the leader of which (Tom Jackson) is also grieving the loss of his boy. To round things out, Emmy Rossum plays a sneaky young cop who sees the major crime invading her snowy burg as her chance to make a big name for herself.

Neeson fans who prefer their gloom and vigilante carnage played straight might give Cold Pursuit the cold shoulder. It’s no classic, but if you happen to be on its nihilistic wavelength, you might find yourself having a pitch-black, weirdly entertaining good time.