Kathmandu:

The Ice Harvest is blacker than a witch’s heart and screamingly funny in an actionless way. A lot happens, single, double and triple crosses and you follow, lose track and follow again a mad plot.

Says Leslie Felperin of Sight and Sound, a really snobby magazine, “Directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and adapted from a novel by Scott Phillips by experienced screenwriters Richard Russo and Robert Benton, The Ice Harvest is a shade more polite than the robustly filthy crime caper Bad Santa. It also comes equipped with a more tortuous neo-noir plot concerning Cusack’s mob lawyer Charlie and Thornton’s porn peddler Vic and their plans to run off with $2.2 million skimmed from Randy Quaid’s local hood Bill Guerrard once the Midwestern bad weather lifts.

Still, the two films share a great deal in common beyond the presence of Thornton, who is as adept as ever at deadpan heartlessness. (When describing how he let a thug kill his wife, Vic nonchalantly reports, ‘He said, ‘Tell me where the money is or I’ll shoot her’. I think he was counting on a level of commitment that just wasn’t there.’) Both movies are set in substantial but provincial US towns (unfestively sunny Phoenix, Arizona is the locale for Bad Santa); both turn on betrayals by crime partners (several betrayals in The Ice Harvest); and both have tacked-on happy endings that nearly spoil the evil fun and suggest a major loss of nerve after negative press screenings. But The Ice Harvest is less likely to develop a cult reputation like Bad Santa’s, perhaps because of its air of zipless, studio-executed smoo-thness. Ramis’ direction is as effortlessly unobtrusive, verging on the bland, as it was in his machine-tooled hits Analyze This (1999) and Analyze That (2002), the modus operandi consisting of hiring excellent, well-cast actors and standing back to watch them do their stuff. Those actors are framed in strictly conventional fashion, and the comedy allowed to shine through.”

Concludes Hollywood insider Jeff Shannon, “Holiday movies don’t get much darker, or more darkly humourous, than The Ice Harvest, an offbeat comedy that defies expectations. The involvement of director Ramis might lead some to expect a straight-up comedy like Groundhog Day or Analyze This, but despite Ramis’ fine and atypically subdued work here, it’s the writers (Robert Benton and Richard Russo) who put a stronger stamp on their adaptation of the novel by Phillips. Benton and Russo previously collaborated on Nobody’s Fool and Twilight (with Benton also directing), and those films are similar in tone and spirit to this quirky, modern-day film noir, set on a freezing Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas, where mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) has a lot on his mind.

He’s just stolen $2 million from his boss (Randy Quaid), he can’t trust his partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), he’s secretly in love with the manager (Connie Nielsen) of the

strip bar he owns, and his best friend (Oliver Platt, giving yet another terrific performance) is married to his ex-wife. Before the night’s over, several murders will complicate matters even further, and throughout it all, The Ice Harvest is anchored by Cusack’s good-natured presence in a bad-natured story that dares to combine double-crosses and bloodshed with elusive yuletide cheer. It’s a strange but oddly appealing combination, not for all tastes but refreshing for that very same reason.”