The Ice Harvest

Here's another one of those $4 DVDs I went nuts on back in September. Fortunately, it was a pretty solid movie. Aside from the three guys on the cover, Randy Quaid and Oliver Platt also star in this 2005 Harold Ramis movie adapted from a 2000 novel of the same name by one Scott Philips. Alright, now that all those details are out of the way, let's discuss the film itself. Again, I liked it. But it was nothing all that special. It's a heist movie, but it's also a dark comedy. Actually it felt a whole lot like Fargo or Burn After Reading in that regard, and I wonder if Ramis wasn't at least a little bit Coen-brother-inspired when he made this movie. I thought the acting was great. I thought the pacing was stellar too, as the movie comes in at just ninety minutes in length but feels padded enough to be a full-blown two-hour drama. The gist is that two lawyers (Cusack and Thornton) have just stolen two million dollars in Wichita, Kansas. It's Christmas Eve. But, of course, their getaway doesn't go completely as planned. And I don't just mean that the man they've stolen from is out to catch them, either. What made this movie interesting wasn't the big picture at all but instead all of the small twists thrown in. There's freezing rain. There's a cop who keeps pulling Cusack over. There are incidents at a strip club. There are marital and familial woes to be dealt with. The double-crossing and plot-twisting that typically accompany dark crime comedies are present as well, and the way all of the elements, both standard and different, combine makes for a movie that, while certainly not special or amazing, holds your interest throughout. I'd actually never heard of this movie before buying it, so I'm not sure how prevalent it is on TV, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an entertaining hour and a half. Maybe it's on Netflix or something. Your call!