Frozen’s Charmless Characters Try Inane Ideas

Remember how abandoned you felt when Open Water‘s scuba diving couple were left behind in the ocean to die? Well now you can feel it all over again in Frozen, writer-director Adam Green’s frostbitten nightmare of neglect on a New England ski lift. Generic college buddies Dan (Kevin Zegers) and Joe (Shawn Ashmore, who ironically played Iceman in the X-Men franchise) meet up for their annual snowboarding jaunt, the depths of their dynamic revealed as passive-aggressive Joe feels like the third wheel to Dan’s girlfriend Parker (Emma Bell), who tagged along. A blizzard is on its way and the resort has started closing down, so what harm could there be in riding up to the mountain one last time? Green (director of Hatchet and the upcoming Hatchet 2) has stumbled onto a nifty variant of a genre paradigm, but just like most American horror films today, Frozen proves more gory than scary—the worst of this trio’s problems isn’t heights, hunger or thirst, but a bloodthirsty pack of wolves licking their lips down below. Green also can’t maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary as we watch three charmlessly written characters bicker and attempt inane ideas. It’s one thing to be scared with them, and quite another to feel trapped with them.