The Frozen Ground (2013) Dir: Scott Walker
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Scott Walker's 2013 crime thriller depicts the harrowing real life crimes of serial killer Robert Hansen in Alaska in the 70's and early 80's. As someone who has an interest in true crime, I was curious to see how well this one would be executed.
The first thing that became unavoidably noticeable was the truly terribly written dialogue. It felt like the first half an hour of the film was all clunky exposition dumps and artifical feeling dialogue. It turned out that this woeful dialogue would be a consistent theme of the film, with it never improving.
I enjoyed the film's cinematography a fair amount. It was very typical of crime thrillers, but it worked well. There were some particularly nice establishing shots in the first half of the film. The visuals certainly helped establish a solid atmosphere, which persisted throughout the film.
I enjoyed the vast majority of the soundtrack, which helped raise suspense and drama as the film progressed. That said, there was a really jarring choice of song to end the film on, which was honestly a really bad choice. It ruined the mood of the film completely.
The narrative was a very mixed bag. On the one hand, the main arc seemed to follow the general timeline of events pretty well, although, you could tell that some liberties had been taken. The subplots felt awfully forced, for both protagonists. Whether they are accurate to the true events or not, I'm uncertain, but they really distracted from the main plot, and didn't seem to fit much thematically.
I'm not entirely sure this was the most respectful depiction of the survivor, whose story was told. It definitely wasn't wholly accurate. However, it is the nature of cinema that creative liberties are taken for the sake of storytelling and entertainment, and as long as Cindy Paulson, the woman who survived Hansen, was comfortable with having her story shown on-screen, I take no real issue with it.
Nicolas Cage gave an adequate performance, which, in typical Cage fashion, was perhaps a little overacted at times. That said, I actually enjoyed his acting here - I thought he fit the detective role quite well.
Vanessa Hudgens had moments where she was very strong with her performance, but these were strewn amongst some overacted and mediocre scenes, which certainly dragged her down. I do think that the poorly written screenplay didn't do her favours, but regardless, she could maybe have done a little better.
Like those above, it was a sonewhat up and down time for John Cusack. I wasn't totally convinced by his acting. He had some well performed scenes, but, be it him or the screenplay, I suspect a little of both, the character's persona felt disjointed and inconsistent. It was frustrating to see - it definitely had something missing.
There were a few names I felt I should mention. Each provided fairly decent performances in their various supporting roles. Those being Radha Mitchell, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Katherine LaNasa, Dean Norris, Gia Mantegna, Kurt Fuller, Matt Gerald, Kevin Dunn and musician 50 Cent. Of these, only Norris stood out.
Overall, this was a rather average crime thriller. It did some things pretty well and others rather poorly. I've definitely seen better depictions of true crime cases. I can't say I'll feel the need to revisit this one anytime soon, but it was interesting to see what Scott Walker and Co tried to do. I don't think they entirely succeeded though.
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