ICEFALL: Embrace the Bad Decisions

ICEFALL (Blu-ray)

2025 / 96 min

Decal Releasing

Review by Stinky the Destroyer😼

Let’s say you’re speeding across a frozen lake on a snowmobile, then suddenly stop because you notice there’s a guy placing a few beartraps in your direct path. You have two options…make a slight course correction, or throw caution to the wind and try to plow right through them. Which would you choose?

That’s what I thought. However, one of the bad guys in Icefall chooses the latter, with predictable results. He’s thrown off his snowmobile, and after a brief scuffle with the protagonist, ends up with his head in the jaws of one of those beartraps. It's a pretty gnarly way to die, to be sure, and the film’s best death scene…but jeez, how dumb can you get?

Not that Icefall depends entirely on the stupidity of its characters to move the plot along. Sometimes it depends on lapses in logic, like when a crew of elite killers steal millions in cash, then put it onboard a plane for safe keeping, a tracking device attached to one of the cases. The plane crashes in a remote lake, which then freezes over. Five months later, the case is pulled from the lake by widowed local poacher named Harlan (Joel Kinnaman), which alerts the bad guys to its location. My question is this: Shouldn’t that tracking device have shown them where the plane went down in the first place?

Ian and Cara attend a Packers game.

Still, I kind of enjoyed the film, most of which consists of these robbers, led by Drake (DeVaughn Nixon), chasing Harlan and Native American game warden Ani (Cara Jade Myers) across the ice and through the woods. Danny Huston, playing the crew’s mastermind, eventually shows up to add menace and shoot a few of his own people. Also featured is the late Graham Greene in one of his final roles. Too bad his character serves no real purpose other than berating Harlan. And despite cover art suggesting Harlan is a kick-ass man of action, he’s not indestructible and actually spends a lot of his time running away. In a way, that’s kind of refreshing.

Despite a bit of dull character exposition regarding Harlan’s past, the budget-conscious action scenes keep things moving along nicely. There’s gunplay, a few bloody brawls and - personally speaking - my introduction to the concept of methane bubbles...pockets of gas trapped in frozen lakes that are revealed to be extremely flammable (as one character discovers the hard way). Icefall ain’t the brainiest thing ever made, but by embracing its dumber aspects rather than condemning them, there’s some fun to be had here.