You know when you used to hang with your friends and one would ask, “Would you rather…” and they would have to choose one horrific hypothetical way to die over another?  Or they would ask “What would you do if you were in THIS terrible situation…?”  Right, well, the movie Frozen is just that sort of idea put on film.  Yeah, it’s a real simple concept.  The problem is finding enough interesting things to fill it with.

One should address the whole Open Water premise, because this is the same one just placed in the New Hampshire mountains in the winter.  Parker (Emma Bell), Dan (Kevin Zegers), and Lynch (Shawn Ashmore) are skiing/snowboarding at a resort on a Sunday.  They manage to convince the ski lift operator to let them have “one last run” at the end of the evening.  Of course they’re the last on the mountain.  For reasons not totally convincing, our three protagonists are left stuck on the ski lift as it is shut down and the lights turned off.  Oh, crap, the resort doesn’t open again until the next weekend, leaving them there for five days.  Let’s see who dies of what and when.

The trailers for this implies that there’s more than just the freezing cold for them to worry about.  Turns out there is, but most of it is the illogical decisions they make and a few leaps of faith by the audience.

The actors do a rather serviceable job despite that fact that their characters are written pretty thinly.  Adam Green, who wrote and directed this, as well as the somewhat well-received Hatchet, doesn’t spend too much time delving too deep into the characters, though others have certainly done worse.  Dan and Lynch have been best friends forever, but now Dan has a girlfriend, Parker, and Lynch feels like she is encroaching on the best bud ski weekend.  His resentment toward Parker and comes to the fore while the three of them are stuck up on the lift.  Well, actually it’s when we lose Dan.  Oops.

These three are left with deciding to stay there until the resort opens again, climb the cables to the nearest lift pole and climb down, or jump down from where they are.  Obviously, waiting is out since they’ll freeze to death before five days is up.  Climbing across the cable is hard because apparently those things are razor sharp (really?).  So Dan decides to jump, rather hastily, because Parker already has a small patch of frostbite on her cheek after only a few hours up there.  Needless to say, Dan’s jump results in the rather grisly compound fracture of both his legs. This is when we find out what other dangers there are.  Sure, he could bleed to death, but then these pesky wolves show up.  In New Hampshire.  At a ski resort.  Wolves haven’t been prevalent in New Hampshire for some years.  It could happen…

And here is where the problems lie in this film.  Some things are either marginally believable, or just stupid.  Throughout the whole film, the girl Parker has only one glove because she dropped one early on while lighting a cigarette on the lift.  After they got stuck.  Yet, she barely keeps that hand in her pocket for the next three days.  And it doesn’t get frostbitten.  And why don’t any of their noses get frostbitten?  Wouldn’t they go first?  Why don’t any of them have cell phones with them? 

We’re told fairly early on that no one knows they’re skiing there.  Why not?  Was it a secret?  They never explain why no one would notice them missing all week.

Ok, I admit there are some pretty effective moments of tension here, but the stuff in between, and the need to suspend our disbelief too often, leave this somewhere around average.  I suppose if you can forgive things like that, you might find this a watchable rental.

~ Neil T. Weakley, your average movie-goer, strangely happier about this than Legion.