Dateline… Cold War. We knew the commie
Ruskies were up to no good, we just didn't know how deep into
the No Good they would go. A crashed plane is found in
the Arctic somewhere, the pilot is dead but there are three
Aryan looking cats in metal tubes on this plane. These
dudes are some serious bad news. One of these cats
awakens and kills up a bunch of people before being
disabled. Probably should've killed him. Then they
should've killed the other two who were still in stasis, but
no… they have to be studied. Eventually the other two
come around, the disabled one becomes enabled and they murder
everybody at this arctic outpost… except the pretty scientist
who the defacto leader of this crew of Aryan Ruskies
rapes. And off they go into the snow. Where they
were headed, who knows?
Fast forward fifty or so years where we meet MegaCorp
executive Jane Frazer (Camille Sullivan) who is leading an
exploratory mission up in these parts searching for what I
believe is oil. Also along is Dr. Malreaux (Dominic
Purcell) who has some legitimate research that he is
conducting that I think MegaCorp is simply using as a front to
do their MegaCorp oil search thing, though Dr. Malraeux takes
his research deadly, deadly serious. He is looking for
the remains of these men, believed to be genetically altered
humans, so further research can be done on them. This
has little to do with anything in relation to this movie, but
later that night Jane pays Dr. Malreaux a late night visit, I
mean it's cold up there, so Jane looked like she wanted to
keep warm. Malreaux declines. Knowing what was
about to transpire, he might've wanted to take Jane up on that
offer. Not so much for himself, but for Jane since her
next physical contact with a man will be less than pleasant.
Sure enough, Malreaux… who we might add is very athletic and
is almost completely resistant to the cold… finds the
'remains' of the three Russian soldiers. We say
'remains' because they are perfectly preserved and after a
little dethawing… turns out these clowns are still alive.
Well, Dr. Malreaux knows what needs to be
done. These dudes need to be put down, but unfortunately
they are now the property of MegaCorp and MegaCorp thinks that
there might be some profitable benefit for keeping these
genetically altered murderous lunatics alive, and Dr. Malreaux
needs to be restrained and imprisoned. And if by
'Profitable Benefit' they meant everybody at this installation
dies horribly, then that's what they meant.
That bit of nastiness done, the Ice Soldiers continue on the
mission they started 50 years ago. Fortunately for us,
Malreaux survives and stumbles upon a Native American tracker
(Adam Beach) to find these three and finally put an end to
their menace. This thing is extremely personal for
Malreaux, though I don't think it's a big mystery why.
This task he has taken will not be easy because these guys are
big, fast, mean and damn near invincible. Saving
grace? They aren't very bright.
Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, as of this moment in time 'Ice
Soldiers' has an IMDB rating of 4.1 which I think is way low,
because I actually enjoyed the movie. It's not the
second coming of the Next Great Action Picture or anything of
that nature, but I did think the film to be involving,
competent, solid entertainment.
The story is probably a bit contrived and had they shifted the
dates about twenty years or so our villains would've fit more
comfortably as Nazi's than as Russian experiments, especially
considering their look, but then our star would've had to be
pretty darned old and I guess having a seventy year old dude
climbing mountains, being lusted after by hotties and engaging
in fist fights with genetically enhanced rapists would be more
unbelievable than it already was.
And about our star… I know Dominic Purcell has never been held
up as the best actor around but he took wooden emotionless
projection to a new level with this one. I'm not quite
sure what he was going for, but for whatever reason, that
stone-faced, unemotional, stoic thing that Purcell does works
more times than it doesn't, and it is functional here for
whatever reason.
The things that made 'Ice Soldiers' work for me were the base
concept, the connection between the character of Malreaux and
these terrible soldiers he's dethawed, the cold atmosphere, a
typical great performance from Michael Ironside as the
hardcore Colonel leading this operation, and some solid
action. The action in 'Ice Solderis' wasn't non-stop but
it was well executed and I cared enough about the characters
and the story itself so that when there were down times from
the action, I was still engaged with the film.
Naturally, there are some things along the lines of logic
which are a little head scratching, mainly why didn't Malreaux
kill these guys when he found them all frozen and stuff.
I guess we could assume he thought they were dead already… but
he knows more about these guys than anybody alive on the
planet Earth, so I wouldn't buy that assumption. Stab
then in the brain or shoot them right there. Of course,
then we'd have no movie, but I'm just saying is all.
Like a said, I liked 'Ice Soldiers'. It was a solid,
entertaining time waster. If I actually rated movies I
certainly would give this one a higher score than a 4.1 which
under almost any scale is a fail. 6.5, at
least.
