I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Serial-killer movies are so much more numerous that actual serial killers, and most of them ignore the victims to focus on the predators, which becomes — in the pop culture aggregate — just one more indignity perpetrated on the dead, who so often were targeted in the first place because they were voiceless, ignored by society, and wouldn’t be missed: they were prostitutes, runaways, drug addicts, homeless, or all of the above. So while newbie New Zealand filmmaker Scott Walker’s The Frozen Ground is a rocky mess that never finds solid footing, it is notable for how Walker chose to frame his true story of how Alaska serial killer Robert Hansen was finally captured in the early 1980s. The only character with any significant personal journey here, in what is essentially a pretty rote police procedural, is Cindy Paulson, a teenaged runaway working the streets of Anchorage who escaped from Hansen’s captivity. She has to learn how to trust the police again — specifically, Detective Jack Halcombe of the Alaska State Police — after the local authorities dismiss her story of kidnapping, rape, torture, and imminent death at Hansen’s hands: “You can’t rape a prostitute,” one cop laughs. Walker might have found his footing if he gave his tale over far more to Paulson: Vanessa Hudgens (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) is astonishingly good as the deeply wounded young woman, and Walker clearly has a line on just what it takes to survive on the streets: one scene, in which Paulson overcomes her aversion to dancing nude on a strip-club stage — she desperately needs some money — by taking a hit of crystal meth is achingly sad, all the more so because it rings with pragmatic truth. The procedural stuff is sporadically intriguing — jargon flies by, challenging you to keep up; there’s a peek into the very early days of FBI criminal profiling — but Nicolas Cage (The Croods) as Halcombe and John Cusack (The Raven) as Hansen don’t have stories anywhere near as compelling as Paulson’s.
It’s a very fine line between showing the horrible things someone does in order to point out how horrible he is, and showing them so that the audience can simply enjoy them. And Hansen would have been an excellent example of the banality of this sort of killer: he really wasn’t a terribly interesting person.
And he’s not the focus of this movie. But he should have been even less the focus of the movie than he is.
Not that I don’t loves me some John Cusack, of course…
This is a decent but grim movie. Particularly because it pulls no
punches in that Cusack (Hansen) is no Hannibal Lector, i.e. cultured,
charming (when not eating someone!), etc. but Hansen is a sturring
self loathing social misfit who takes out his frustrations on people
who ironically he considers subhuman (i.e. street walkers, and
strippers) particularly, in the movie at least, the Hudgens
character. In case a viewer of “The Frozen Ground” is left
unsatisfied with the necessary compression of events, composite
characters, etc. that are necessary to produce a movie of less than
two hours in length “based on a true story”, and want to
learn more about the real life serial killer Hansen and the case that
inspired the movie one could do worse then read “Fair Game”
(http://tinyurl.com/mqssp5z) by Bernard DuClos that was recently
republished. Reading it as a companion to the movie will help the
viewer of “The Frozen Ground” realize the liberties that
were inevitably taken to make it suitable for the silver screen as
well as understand elements of Hansen’s life and killing spree that
the picture did not have time to delve into such as more of Hansen’s
background (which early on indicated a propensity toward crime) and
the backstory of the whole oil pipeline boom that produced the mafia
controlled prostitution/strip bar scene that Hudgen’s character is
entangled in.