Can you imagine being stuck 50 feet up on a chairlift? Now imagine that everyone but you and your two friends have gone home and won’t return for four days at the earliest. Oh, and there’s a blizzard bearing down and hungry wolves licking their chops in hopes that you’re foolish enough to jump.
Slowly your skin starts to curdle from frostbite and your body temperature is going south of 80 degrees. Can you feel it? Does it make you uncomfortable? Well, now imagine something even worse and you’ll begin to understand what it’s like sitting through “Frozen.” And, no, that shiver you felt isn’t from the cold; it’s from knowing you wasted $10 on a thrill-less thriller that gradually heads downhill after a promising start.
Give writer-director Adam Green credit, though, for having the chutzpah to blatantly rip-off the unnerving shark tale “Open Water” by putting everyday people at the mercy of natural predators and the elements. Just substitute the scuba gear for skis and fins for fangs and voila! He forgets, however, that at some point you have to deliver genuine excitement and characters you can gain more than a passive interest in.
“Frozen” ultimately fails on both counts. But for nearly an hour, Green holds you in his frail grip, as he presents three Boston-area college students spending a Sunday afternoon on the slopes.
The trio, played by WB vets Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers, are just petty and bland enough to seem real, as they mount the lift for what they believe will be their final run of the day. Of course, a series of preposterous events leaves them stranded halfway up the mountain, as the light – and intelligence – dims.
As Hitchcock proved with his brilliant “Lifeboat,” a small group of people alone, trapped by Mother Nature, can make for some highly compelling psychological drama. But Green is no Hitchcock.
Heck, he’s not even John Carpenter. Which might explain why he makes no attempt to get inside the heads of his three slackers. He’s more into the superficial aspects, like young, taut flesh being devoured by bitter cold and ravenous dogs Yet, like I said, it works for nearly an hour, due to Green’s ability to play on the “what-if” factor, as in “what if” that happened to me. What would I do? At what point would I give up?
