Frozen review

Director Adam Green latest production, Frozen, follows the impromptu vacation of a few college students to go skiing to escape the rigors of academia for a day. A guys-only day out at the ski resort becomes stymied by a clingy girlfriend, leaving the guys stuck on the bunny hill most of the day. When a last minute plea for one more run leaves them stranded on the chairlift with no chance for being let down until the next weekend, their day of R&R begins to favor just staying alive.

It’s a shame that Frozen was unable to introduce a single new concept to the survival horror film genre. Frozen fails to inspire anything but weakly written dialogue between the characters, which ranges from horror film ironic to stale bickering. Adam Green cannot be relied on for witty dialogue, and never will you see so many asinine lines between characters pretending to be entertaining. All of it sounded like rehashed college classroom conversation, except without the actual context of reality to frame it.

The actors hardly are able to establish a rapport with each other before they are placed in the extreme conditions, and for that they can’t be blamed. For a movie with only three characters to follow, the script owes more to the wolves for creating sympathetic characters.

The wolves, though, were excellent.

Director Adam Green’s ability to capture the movie inched just above the feckless script’s dependency on the premise. Whatever talents Green displays doesn’t make up for the clichéd plot development and a borrowed survival-horror concept. Green does manage to make use of a terrific location and beautiful landscape. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough to draw the watcher’s attention away from the distastefulness of watching a college girl pee her pants.

Goodness be thanked, it’s only an hour and a half. The bad part comes when you are served a forced ending, selling out any integrity the whole beginning and middle had spent accruing. As for me, I can’t wait until Mythbusters gets hold of this one. There’s just too much riding on this story’s believability.

Consider Frozen one part a poor man’s Alive and another part a common man’s Sophie’s Choice. While watching Frozen you want the movie to take you by surprise and rattle you, but in the end it fails to expand beyond the status quo. A linear plot with no surprises and little attachment to anything that had transpired within the previous hour and a half…and wolves, it achieves one additional star for use of a good location.