Review: Cold Storage

Director:  Jonny Campbell

Stars:  Liam Neeson, Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery

David Koepp is one of the most successful screenwriters to have worked in Hollywood over the last 40 years, with a hand in kickstarting franchise IPs such as Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and Spider-man, but his output of late has been wildly inconsistent. Just last year Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag sprung from the sparkiest script he’d put his name to… and then a few months later he was responsible for Jurassic World: Rebirth. Cold Storage – appropriately – has the feel of something that’s been laying around in a drawer for a while. Maybe even decades. When in fact it’s based on Koepp’s own 2019 novel. A defiantly schlocky sci-fi horror B-movie, director Jonny Campbell wrestles something colourfully repugnant from the material but, as a friend said to me, “It just looks like a Netflix movie” (derogatory).

Amiable ex-con Teacake (Joe Keery) is reasonably happy in his dead-end job as a security guard at Atchison Self-Storage; a remote and labyrinthine facility built into a defunct Kansas mine. Little does he know that the property used to be the site of a military containment bunker for some of the most lethal biological weapons on the planet. Brought to earth over 40 years prior when a failing satellite crashed, a mutated fungus that wiped out an Australian village was placed in – yup – cold storage a few hundred feet beneath his work station, and it’s starting to defrost.

Cold Storage splits itself into two camps. Teacake and his new co-worker (the plucky and curious Naomi played by Georgina Campbell) whose nominal sparkage is good enough to start excavating walls in pursuit of a mysterious ‘ping’… and military retirees Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), who get a heads up that the fungal foe they encountered 18 years ago is about to get loose. Quinn gets insider assistance from ‘Abigail’ (Ellora Torchia), while calling in favours on his way to the site.

Given that this is Koepp’s second go around with this story, it all feels surprisingly undercooked. The stakes are established, sure, but there’s a curious lack of momentum, or even opportunities for dynamic action. The locale is so remote that efforts to get additional bodies on site to ratchet up a body count mostly feel contrived. Koepp seems fond of his two young leads and their sweet romantic potential, but one senses that he’s truly aligned with the more seasoned characters, Quinn and Romano, whose cynical “world’s gone to hell” worldview lenses the whole through weary Boomer eyes.

This seems at-odds with the puckish, youthful spirit of the B-movie that director Campbell wants to dabble in. When he’s not splattering the screen with gaudy CG animals exploding in green goo, these efforts are, at best, workmanlike, hampered to a degree by the bland and limiting environs of the story. There are only so many ways you can make a brightly-lit storage facility look interesting, and using loud noises to imitate jump scares doesn’t help any. His work is broad, colourful and cartoonish, efforts that extend to the performances. Keery has nearly nothing to work with. Georgina Campbell likewise, but she’s clearly putting in the effort to muster something from Naomi. Neeson, meanwhile, still appears to be in Frank Drebin mode, which at least gives his side of the story a little spice (or as he might call it, “Pucker factor”).

Adding to the sense that this is a cranky old guy’s story dressed up in faux-punk clothing, the film has a curious through-line about job satisfaction. That you get out of something what you put into it, and that duty is it’s own reward. It comes across as a bit of a finger-wagging lesson and at the film’s end unfortunately frames the whole as a convoluted piece of pro-military propaganda. Anyone not a party to the movie’s moral compass is presented as part of the American problem, bloated with hubris, stupidity or mediocrity.

Horrible as most of the CG elements look, one sequence manages to steal the whole show. A scampering cockroach followed from behind as it shimmies from the depths of the facility up to the surface to the tune of “One Way or Another”. It’s a little kernel of rancid joy in the middle of a rather turgid movie that clearly loves zombie flicks but seems to have no idea of how to go about unleashing one. If half of this energy had been mustered up elsewhere, Campbell and co. might’ve had something. Instead Cold Storage ends with a computer generated deer vomiting all over the audience. Which comes to feel emblematic of the whole.