EDITOR’S NOTE: On Thursday, Dave Thomas learned this movie is being made. This is his review of the film-to-be purely as he imagines it.

There’s a scene in 2014’s “In Order of Disappearance” where the hero Nils, played by Stellan Skarsgard, has just finished smashing Kristofer Hivju’s face repeatedly with fists.

The Norwegian movie doesn’t show the actual fight; it cuts from Nils slamming the face of Hivju’s Stig into his steering wheel to both Nils and Stig laying exhausted on the ground in front of Nils’ snowplow.

Stig begins to give Nils the standard movie tough-guy speech: “Do you have any idea who you’re f---ing with?”

Nils wants to know. He’s hunting down the drug lord who murdered his son and framed it to look like an accidental overdose. He needs to know — but Stig doesn’t tell him who he’s f---ing with.

Instead, he asks the clearly exhausted Nils if he’s tired. They both are, and they begin to laugh.

It’s hard not to laugh along — at least up until Nils shoots Stig in the head with a hunting rifle.

It’ll be interesting to see how this scene is adapted for American audiences when it’s remade and released in the U.S. in February as “Hard Powder,” which might be the best name for a movie that was pitched as “Taken, But With Snowplows.”

Just like its Scandinavian sister, “Hard Powder” centers around a man named Nils, who is so good and so dedicated at plowing the streets of his Colorado town that the people just named him Citizen of the Year. And when his son is murdered by the leader of a drug cartel, Nils begins plowing the streets with blood.

This apparently triggers a gang war, which only offers more opportunities for Nils to grimly intone, “Snow way out,” before burying a cartel member alive in the snow.

Hans Petter Moland, the director of the “In Order of Disappearance,” is returning to direct the English-language remake. Stellan Skarsgard, who is likely best known to American audiences as Dr. Erik Selvig from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or as Bill in the “Mamma Mia!” Cinematic Universe, isn’t coming back as the lead.

Instead, the hero is Liam Neeson.

Neeson has been on a B-level action-movie kick since he starred in “Taken,” a film he thought was going to be a straight-to-video release.

“I really thought it would be kind of a little side road from my so-called career,” Neeson told GQ in 2014. That “little side road” ended up creating a nearly $1 billion franchise.

Since then, the roles Neeson has taken in these movies feature him as ex-mob enforcers or hard-boiled police officers — all characters who have a predilection for violence.

With that kind of original story, the audience doesn’t think twice about how Neeson’s character has the “particular set of skills” to blow through the no-name cannon fodder that fill a movie’s second and third acts.

For “Hard Powder,” Moland should take some cues from another action thriller from his home country — “Headquarters.”

In that movie, a corporate recruiter who moonlights as an art thief has his world turned upside down by an ex-Special Forces commando who is really good at another kind of headhunting.

It’s a messed-up movie that stays with the viewer for how hard it treats the protagonist, Aksel Hennie’s Roger Brown.

Even though it’s all make-believe, all of the movie’s stunts looked like they hurt — like the scene in which the villain, played by “Game of Thrones” star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, rams the police car Brown is detained in off the cliff with a semitrailer truck. Brown survives because the two overweight police officers next him take the brunt of the collision — with messy results.

“Hard Powder” will likely be a better movie if it treats Neeson’s character as a human being — someone who can get tired, both physically and mentally, from all of the revenge killing he’s about to do over 90 minutes of screentime.

But if Moland is not going to show us a human being who is excited and exhausted from the insanity of the premise of “Hard Powder,” then he should go full Schwarzenegger with no apologies.

If Neeson isn’t seen struggling with his first kill, he should at least say, “Mr. Plow, that name again is Mr. Plow,” before running a bad guy over with his plow.

If Neeson isn’t running ragged because he’s just a snowplow driver, then he should tell his wife he gave some cartel troublemaker “the cold shoulder” minutes after pushing his car into a frozen lake.