Nicolas Cage and John Cusack star in The Frozen Ground, an Alaskan serial killer drama from first-time director Scott Walker. Both stars have fallen on hard times, appearing in films below their talent level, frequently looking ridiculous in the process. It seemed like Cage was in freefall, in a series of increasingly ridiculous movies where eventually even he couldn’t hide his own indifference to the material. But Cusack hasn’t even had the benefit of leading man roles to sink to a certain level, instead popping up in dubious supporting work. His slurred-voice yokel in The Paperboy and his President Nixon in The Butler both feel like absurd Simpsons caricatures that belie Cusack’s natural intelligence. Maybe it’s fitting that Cusack and Cage get out of their ruts and appear in something a little more highbrow, despite the fact that their last collaboration, Con Air, reached near-poetic heights of stupidity.
Fortunately, they don’t look ridiculous during the course of this true crime procedural. For one, they’re not bad: Cage is dialed-down and certainly functional in a role that requires a steady compass, not a scenery-chewing jackass or a quietly intense neurotic. Cusack is quite good, as a small town killer with a common home, a common wife, common kids, and a common attraction to kidnapping and torturing young girls. Fortunately, there’s someone else around to embarrass themselves, and that is 50 Cent, here playing antagonistic pimp Clate Johnson. Mr. Cent has developed a semi-interesting onscreen presence, downbeat and appropriate for undemanding secondary roles. Here, he’s adequate, with the exception of the dubious bob he wears, one that makes him look like President Camacho’s long-lost uncle.
It’s one of a few cheaper distractions that limit the ability of The Frozen Ground to deliver on a few levels. The story involves State Trooper Jack Halcombe (Cage) in his attempts to solve a notorious serial killer case that has left body parts strewn all over the woodlands in different directions, suggesting a collector who knows full well that, during some seasons, locating missing persons is close to impossible. The work is predictably gnawing at him, creating tension at home with his wife Allie (Radha Mitchell, wasted). Eventually, the stack of evidence he’s procured is deemed circumstantial and flimsy by his higher ups, though he knows exactly who is to blame.
Everything suggests that local resident Robert Hansen (Cusack) is the culprit. Bookish and unassuming, Hansen is respected enough in the community to be able to hide in plain sight, even with lackeys employed by the local strip clubs. Cusack gives Hansen a smile that seems forced, almost as if his public life is an elaborate mask for the sexual damage he causes to the strippers, prostitutes, and wayward women he abducts before taking them to his cabin. The Frozen Ground admirably avoids the seedier details of these encounters, opting instead to normalize Hansen as a hobbyist with unsavory pet projects, but a severe disdain for chaos or messiness.
The attention to detail somehow doesn’t include Cindy (Vanessa Hudgens), a stripper who manages to escape with her life, though not without traumatic scars. What’s heartbreaking is the empathy that the film shows towards Cindy, who comes from a decidedly un-promising background, stumbling into dancing as much as she falls into drugs and drink. Being abducted and saving herself doesn’t change her outlook: to her, it’s just further proof that she’s circling down the toilet, and Halcombe soon learns that, despite being a witness, she still needs saving. Rather than be a damsel in distress, Hudgens actually gives this character layers, suggesting a woman with a self-awareness that complicates her reliance on unreliable men, her need to stick a finger in the flame.
Most of The Frozen Ground is turgid procedural nonsense. Halcombe’s dedication to the case borders on saintly, his need to catch Hansen and bring Hansen to justice first questioned, then wholeheartedly embraced by his stay-at-home wife. It brings him into conflict with superiors, a tiresome back-and-forth that’s one of the film’s few naked concessions to genre, portraying an indifferent bureaucracy versus One Good Cop. These are characters that don’t exist beyond the narrative, breathing only to bring justice to the world or corrupt it. The film’s allegiance is to the facts of the case, with Hansen being a villain that needs to be apprehended and cuffed, in the end result in a roll call of the lost lives involved in the case (accompanied, poorly, by an uptempto rock song).
Ultimately, The Frozen Ground has no aspiration to be anything beyond an episode of Law & Order. That’s a fine, if modest goal, though director Walker lacks the chops to give the story the appropriate scope. It feels like there are half-hearted stab towards a polluted community, one where a “respected member of society” can be enabled by the town’s criminal forces (wigs and all!), though Walker doesn’t know whether to make it an issue of class, sex, or any other system. Instead, it’s a two-hander of sorts, as the film makes no secret of the killer’s identity. This results in just involves waiting for the bad guy to slip up, and the knowledge that this is a true story only reminds us that the expected moment beckons in the celluloid distance. The Frozen Ground is like walking on a treadmill: you’re not really going anywhere, but it certainly feels like you are, even if everything stops and you’re in the exact same place.
Den of Geek Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars