When Billy Bob Thornton’s smug mug appears in another movie around holiday time, and they advertise it overtly as another “Bad Santa,” two things we know are to hide the children and lock up the whiskey.
What we don’t know is whether the new anti-Christmas movie will be any good. It takes much slogging through “The Ice Harvest” – at least 10 of the 12 days of Christmas – before the conclusion is obvious: No-ho-ho.
At least “Bad Santa” had the bad taste to go way over the top and far down the other side in obliterating holiday values. “The Ice Harvest” is too tepid to have much taste either way, and it ends up lulling us to apathy.
Book author Scott Phillips and screenwriter Richard Russo tried for some Wichita Noir with their hard-boiled Christmas plot. It was a worthy effort, as movies from Russo’s “Nobody’s Fool” to the Coen Brothers’ “Fargo” have captured the sad hilarity of petty criminals in snowbound towns.
But the lesson of the better movies is that perfect tone is hard to achieve. You have to love the losers, the losers have to be consistently inept and their own character flaws have to become the key to their eventual success.
We never get to know our anti-hero for “The Ice Harvest,” a Wichita lawyer named Charlie Arglist played by John Cusack. He’s supposed to be a bumbler, but he dresses well; he’s supposed to have screwed up his family, but he seems like a decent guy.
Other than the fact he and partner Vic (Thornton) are this Christmas Eve night skimming $2 million in cash from their boss, a petty mobster who peddles strippers and porn.
“Just act normal for a few hours, and we’re home free,” Vic warns the nervous Charlie. So of course Charlie will have to act completely abnormal and blow the scam.
Just when we’re settling into the weird charm of a strip bar adorned with tinsel, director Harold Ramis takes a 20-minute detour. Charlie has a drunken best friend (Oliver Platt) who ended up marrying Charlie’s ex-wife. They drink a lot more, and have pointless arguments with bar patrons, and what was this movie about, again?
Meanwhile, the alluring menace of Billy Bob disappears altogether, as if they were trying to cut him from the film.
Charlie pines for an untouchable dancer named Renata (Connie Nielsen), and perhaps they could become a dynamic dirty duo, a couple of nihilist Nutcrackers. But “Ice Harvest” never takes that relationship anywhere, either.
If you’re going to be cruel about Christmas, you’d better be funny. Ramis doesn’t seem to get that you don’t have to be a mobster to hate the holidays. Plenty of good people are amusingly irritated by forced celebration – see Steve Martin and John Candy in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” for example.
The cure for sickly sweet Christmas movies is not necessarily cruel and inhuman ones. At least give us one person to love, even if they’re doggedly assassinating every moron in a Santa suit.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
** | “The Ice Harvest”
R for nudity, language and violence|1 hour, 28 minutes|BLACK HUMOR|Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Robert Benton and Richard Russo, based on the novel by Scott Phillips; starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt and Randy Quaid|Opens today at area theaters.
