In the world of cinema there is a thin line between a film that is bad but has a great idea, and a film that is good, has a great idea, but still does not live up to its potential. Frozen walks this line carefully, and while sometimes it soars past it, other times it falls down in failure.
Dan Walker (Kevin Zegers) and Joe Lynch (Shawn Ashmore) are childhood friends and spend much of their time at ski resorts, but on one special Sunday afternoon what seems like a regular ski trip turn into an unbelievable disaster.
This Sunday Dan decides to bring his girlfriend along that he has been getting serious with. Because she is an inexperienced snowboarder the three spend their entire day on the bunny slope, and just before the resort closes the idea hits them to convince the attendant to allow them to make one quick run before it closes. The attendant allows them to go through and when he is relieved he tells his replacement to shut everything down when the last three come down, forgetting that three other people were on the slope before them, and when they come down the resort shuts down leaving our main characters on the ski lift.
It doesn’t hit them at first, Dan, Joe, and Parker (Emma Bell) simply think the attendant is playing a joke on them, but as time goes by they soon come to the horrific realization that they have been left there, and the resort does not open again until Friday.
The question here is do our heroes have the will to survive? Dan quickly decides the only way they can survive is if he jumps from the lift and crawls to help, but when wolves start coming and the cold keeps getting colder, Dan, along with the other three wonder if they will ever find a way out.
Frozen should be a gripping and nail-biting thriller, unfortunately while it certainly has its moments, the characters are so hard to relate to that the audience cannot be on the edge of their seat. Why? Because we don’t care what happens!
The script tries, we all know the lengthy but random conversations between the main characters are meant to be development, but it just isn’t. The dialogue is so bad it took away from the entertainment alone, and that takes some real talent to be that bad.
Adam Green’s directing is the exact opposite from his writing. His direction suggests an intelligent thriller, while low-budget it hits hard on the scenery, we can tell he knows how to handle the camera work, and that I am thankful for in the film. I only wish his directing would cancel out the script, but then we have the gloriously bad acting to take care of that.
Emma Bell fails, plain and simple. I did not believe she was stuck on a ski lift, I did believe she was scared, I did not believe she was sad. Some say she did good, I say she was terrible. Kevin Zegers, playing her boyfriend does not do well either. I understand the crew probably did not have the money for a strong cast, but my goodness was there an audition or anything? Come on guys, we can do better than this!
However, Shawn Ashmore does do the film justice. He may not shine in his role, and he may not be great, but I would not mind seeing him again in the future. With the proper script he has a shot at a career in this film business.
Final Word – I wish I liked Frozen, and the first hour is unusually inventive, but the last thirty minutes, the ones that matter the most are not at all.
C
