Decal Releasing
Icefall is the kind of mid-budget action-thriller Hollywood made its bread and butter through the 1990s, but it’s staged on a micro budget because of the breakdown of the system that supported the films it’s emulating.
Ruzowitsky directs with competence and the film is anchored by a classic stoic action performance from Joel Kinnaman, the film boasts an intelligent script with a cool thriller set up.
Unfortunately it is also unmistakably scarred by a thin production budget that shows in nearly every frame. The actors and script are working hard to convince us that lives are in danger in the wilderness and they shouldn’t be working against green screen work and flat photography.
Kinnaman and his co-star Cara Jade Myers are real assets as the mysterious poacher Harlan and the Blackfoot game warden Ani who has captured him.
In classic Hollywood style their personal struggle is playing out at the wrong place and the wrong time as a particularly murderous crew of thieves dumped a fortune in stolen Mob money over the Reserve and they’re looking for it.
Kinnaman understands this kind of pulp action schlock (using that term with love, by the way) in his bones, which is why he was so great in both Woo’s Silent Night and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Myers is a fine young actress who was very good in Killers of the Flower Moon, and she more than acquits herself in bringing a totally ridiculous situation to a degree of emotional reality.
The script unfolds with efficiency, with splashes of high violence and a nice darkly ironic tone. The dialogue is spare and the screenplay is permitted to treat its audience like adults and let silence and observation do some of the exposition for us. I really enjoy the film conceptually and you can see how if it had been given the support it needed, Icefall could have been a modern sleeper.
And yet, Icefall did not get that support.
The limitations of the production budget are painfully apparent. This is not a critic bagging on a low budget film, as I deeply appreciate low budget films. This is a recognition of what a film requires in order to meet its potential. The story dictates the production, and what the production needs– as someone pretty famous said long ago “The play’s the thing…”
In the case of Icefall, as you might expect from the title, we have a survival thriller that depends on the harshness of the elements to drive forward the tension of the plot. The environments these people are working in literally want to kill them every second they’re outside.
You cannot communicate that to an audience on a soundstage, with a green screen and digital effects. Disney can barely create convincing desert landscapes with its massive purpose-built dome soundstage they use for the Star Wars television shows, there’s just no way for a small production to do it except by being on location. The cost-cutting is so overwhelming on Icefall that I don’t know that the film ever delivers two location shots in a row.
What makes this so frustrating is that Icefall is exactly the kind of movie that benefits from just a little more money. Not blockbuster money, but real money: enough to give its setting scale, its action weight, and its tension room to breathe. The ambition is there; the resources are not. If you never feel scared for your heroes as they try to stave off murderers and the elements because you never believe they’re in danger from the elements, a lot of what the film is trying to achieve falls apart.
Icefall speaks to a larger, more troubling trend. Hollywood has completely abandoned the space Icefall occupies: the adult, star-driven thriller. The film is not franchise bait with a price tag like the GDP of a small country, and it isn’t art-house bait that A24 or NEON would take on and therefore it seems like there’s just no room at the inn for it.
And strangely enough, movies like Icefall are exactly what we need.
If the movie industry in America is ever going to pull itself off of its ass and get to work again instead of shipping what passes for stars to Romania to digitally simulate California because the tax breaks make it cheaper we need, not masterpieces, but reliable, clever, adult films made on a small scale that get an audience in the theater on a weekly basis. Not six times a year and twice in the summer, like some kind of Chuck E Cheese restaurant for adults. It needs to be producing a lot of content inexpensively (but still credibly) that might make couples, or lonely hearts, or teenagers look at each other on a free Friday or Saturday night and say “Wanna catch a movie?”
In the end, Icefall succeeds despite its constraints. Kinnaman is excellent, the script is sharp, and the core thriller mechanics still work. But the film’s most lasting impact may be what it unintentionally reveals: that solid, intelligent thrillers are no longer failing because audiences don’t want them, but because a system that once nurtured them is rotting on the vine.
Mild recommendation.
