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91In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest.
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91The Ice Harvest isn't a subversive piece of work; it's not making some grand statement about the dark side of the holiday spirit. But what it IS saying in its grimly funny way is that we can't always control the timing of our disasters.
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80Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.
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80Ramis is at his best when dealing with men facing a soul-defining crisis, and he finds plenty to work with in Russo and Benton's script, which offers Russo's trademark blend of colorful characters and slow-building dilemmas. The Ice Harvest finds them all operating in top form in as dark a territory as they've ever explored.
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80From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."
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80A droll, dark Christmas treat for adults, a delightful alternative to the usual holiday-themed fare.
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80This often macabre comedy allows us to doff such civilized traits as taste and decency. We're free to laugh at anything, and we do. Oh, the shame -- and the good time.
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80A funny but genuinely dark story.
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75I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die. I liked it for Charlie's (Cusack) essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas.
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75Thornton is in great form as the sardonic Vic, whose disposal of an apparently dead body in a trunk is a hilarious set piece.
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75The Ice Harvest doesn't have much heft or resonance. But as an antidote to the sugary confections of the season, its hung-over cynicism works wonders.
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75How about something a little nasty for the holidays?
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75"Bad Santa" it's not. Bumptiously entertaining it is.
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75That may be your lump of coal, but it seems a precious gift to me.
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75This isn't a crime comedy, exactly. It's a slightly absurd, minimalist noir, in the ZIP code of "Blood Simple" and "Fargo."
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70Fine thesping in the service of characters as meaty as they are immoral makes this material a treat for grown up audiences with an ear for sardonic dialogue.
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67It never achieves the bleak poetry and tawdry tragedy of the best examples of the genre, but the understated humor is nicely played by Cusack and Thornton.
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67It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.
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63Openly embraces its noir roots, right down to the femme fatale (Connie Nielsen) who strikes a Lauren Bacall-ish pose in an open doorway and whose eyes are lit by a horizontal slant of light.
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63This is strictly B-movie fare. It tries to do some of the same things as "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and suffers as a result of the comparison.
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A little more "Grifters" would have gone far here. Not toward making the film palatable for the mainstream, perhaps, but at least toward selling its neo-noir story to an audience already inclined toward such seedy material.
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50The Ice Harvest is not "Bad Santa" redux. It has comic moments - primarily from Oliver Platt, in fine drunken stupor - but Ramis' tiptoe into film noir isn't really a comedy.
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50The nasty, violent material has two small beacons of hope - Nielsen as a fair-weather stripper in the manner of old film-noir dames, and Quaid as a scurvy mobster who hates being cheated. With his puffy, reddened face, Quaid looks like a bad Santa.
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50Ice Harvest's plot sounds like an antidote to the season's holiday sweetness. And it's being touted as this year's Bad Santa. But the only similarities are the holiday season, the criminal milieu and Thornton.
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50For a comedy, it isn't that funny. For a thriller, it isn't that thrilling. In short, it would have been a much better movie if focused on either/or.
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50An additional change in the film's adaptation from Scott Phillips' novel substitutes the author's original ending for a redemptive conclusion that seems indicative of The Ice Harvest's unwillingness to really plumb the real depths of the darkness it has set in motion.
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50It's a dark lark, no more and no less, a caper comedy full of enough kinky jokes to remind the audience that, indeed, you're supposed to laugh at it every now and again.
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40A decent enough little B-movie which delivers some pleasingly weird violence and endless plot reversals. But there's still a mild sense of pointlessness to the whole thing and the feeling that in different hands it could have been much better.
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40Black comedy? Black enough, but they muffed the other word. Robert Benton and Harold Ramis, put on dunce caps and go stand in the corner.
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30There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.
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What a waste.
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25Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 23
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Mixed: 5 out of 23
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Negative: 9 out of 23
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JasonR3Not enough humor or heart to make up for a lot of material that's on the extreme end of noir.
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JeffM.8Good, dark fun.
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DougR.6Not bad, not good. You won't feel like you wasted $9, but you leave feeling it could have been much more.