A lot of thrillers operate on the lessons of the boiling frog. In that classic allegory, a frog dropped in boiling water will jump out, but if the poor creature is placed in slowly warming water, it will stay until it’s cooked. You see those lessons in action whenever a supporting character gradually blunders into danger — Oh, hey, what’s this conspicuously terrifying door/ticking box/bad idea that I’m looking at? — and doesn’t make it out alive. Because the smarter frog tends to have star billing, it evades its scripted threats. It might be as bloodied as Bruce Willis at the end of “Die Hard,” but it gets out of hot water, each and every time.
There’s an army of pot-ready frogs in the amiable, self-knowingly goofy “Cold Storage.” A B-movie throwback with plentiful winks, it has few thrills, but it has a touch of science, a plausible-enough threat, suitably disgusting splatter, appealing actors and a fleet running time. Crucially, it also has a familiar, seemingly indestructible setup that, at once, taps into the audience’s fears — of threats known and unknown, of authority, of government and little green monsters from outer space — and plays into fantasies of heroism. Something terrible and strange is out there, the movie insists, and it’s coming straight for you and you and you. Given the odds and absurdity, there is only one solution: Liam Neeson.
Neeson shows up now and again as Robert Quinn, a so-called bioterror operative, one of those weary, tough-talking know-it-alls who’s idling in clandestine shadows. Neeson and an obviously tickled Lesley Manville as Trini Romano, another crack operative, get things started in a desolate Australian outpost, where empty cars and vacant buildings portend the worst. There might not be vultures circling in the sky, but there should be, given the corpses scattered across the scene. Soon, Quinn and Romano have zipped up their hazmat suits and are purposefully heading into danger alongside a scientist (Sosie Bacon) who, perhaps because she’s jet-lagged after her flight, is helpfully careless. She goes splat, and it’s on.
Most of the story takes place years later inside a huge, largely underground self-storage facility. There, the movie’s sweet, likable leads — Georgina Campbell as Naomi and Joe Keery, from “Stranger Things,” as Teacake — smoothly step up. Their characters are working the night shift together for the first time. They are largely unknown to each other but not for long because it’s conveniently lonely work, and they’re cute, single and equally curious about an inexplicable beeping that’s coming from behind a wall. Since they have nothing better to do, they break through that wall, the first of a series of obstacles that they clear amid a succession of fast-encroaching hazards, including a mystery fungus. Guns fire, heads explode.
That’s more or less it, and what follows plays out pretty much as the movies have taught you to expect. Some of those pictures were written by David Koepp, who adapted this one from his 2019 novel “Cold Storage.” (Koepp’s numerous script credits include “Jurassic Park” installments, “War of the Worlds” and smaller puzzlers like “Kimi.”) The director of “Cold Storage,” Jonny Campbell, keeps all the story pieces and the camera moving well enough, using jump scares as needed (so: often). He and his young stars find a good groove together, and Keery and Campbell convincingly hit all the right notes — sharp, funny, freaked, tender — to draw you to them. It’s unclear what Vanessa Redgrave is doing here, but it’s nice to see her.
Cold Storage Rated R for exploding heads and bodies. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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