Cold Storage

“Pay attention,” a cheeky title card for “Cold Storage” declares, “this shit is real.” Well, it is and isn’t. In adapting the screenplay from his own 2019 novel, writer David Koepp has utilized the real-life 1979 incident in which the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, burned up, broke apart, and scattered debris across Western Australia. Though all the remains were eventually collected, what “Cold Storage” presupposes is, what if it wasn’t? Written by middling thriller hall of famer David Koepp, adapted from his own 2019 novel, and directed by Jonny Campbell, this jovial horror/thriller/comedy hybrid begins with a biochemist (Sosie Bacons) and a pair of black biochemical op agents, Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), investigating a leftover Skylab oxygen tank that has been transformed into a makeshift Australian museum and is now oozing some type of mutated green fungus. It’s a snappy opening defined by a dexterous camera that is always pulling back or craning up to both elicit surprise and dispense information. And because mankind can’t leave well enough alone, the group takes a fungus sample for study, subsequently transporting it to a federal cold storage facility in Kansas that via time lapse photography we see sealed off and mutated, itself, into an unsuspecting self-storage company.

That’s where “Cold Storage” mostly takes place, at the self-storage company, picking up 18 years later as security guards Travis (Joe Keery) Naomi (Georgina Campbell) settle in for the night shift. They are not slackers, exactly, just two people trying to get things together, and bonding from both desire and necessity when a faint beeping drives them crazy, sending them hacking through drywall to find the source and into a situation that spirals quickly out of control as the green fungus oozes amok. When it does, Quinn is summoned from retirement by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), a deskbound military bureaucrat ignoring the nothing to see here admonishment of her commanding officer (Richard Brake), a storyline that neatly splits the difference between big government proactivity and paranoia. Eventually, Quinn re-teams with the also-retired Trini to make haste for Kansas to help Travis and Naomi prevent an impending global calamity.

Neeson finds a sweet spot between Frank Drebin Jr. and all his characters through the years with names like Bill Marks and Mike McCann while Manville is wry in a way that is baked into the character rather than a wink at the audience. If anything, “Cold Storage” might have used more Neeson and Manville, though on other hand, just as the story ultimately turns on Travis and Naomi so does the movie turn on Keery and Campbell. They are going concerns on account of two popular TV shows, “Stranger Things” and “Black Mirror,” respectively, though I have seen neither, making this my first experience with them, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed their warm and amusing performances as two people having the time of their lives while having to stay alive. They find the perfect middle ground of never taking it all too seriously but never devolving into full-throated send-up, evoking the same B-movie spirit as “Cold Storage” itself, summarized in the climactic show-stopping moment when Quinn dispatches Travis and Naomi on a mission to, like, you know, save civilization: “You two may have started the night minimum wage guards,” he says, “but you’re a green light team now.” I was watching alone in my living room, but I stood up and cheered.