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'The Ice Harvest': Won't reap laughs

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Harold Ramis ("Groundhog Day") directed. Robert Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer") co-wrote the script. And the cast includes John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Platt, Randy Quaid and Connie Nielsen.

So, how did so many talented people manage to make such a dismal slush of a black comedy?

Focus Features

'The Ice Harvest'

D-

The verdict: The movie equivalent of yellow snow.

Director: Harold Ramis
Starring: John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt, Randy Quaid
Run time: 88 minutes
Release date: Nov. 23, 2005
Rating: R for violence, language and sexuality/nudity.
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"The Ice Harvest" follows mob lawyer Charlie (Cusack) through a very long, very drunken Christmas Eve in icebound Wichita, Kan. He and Vic (Thornton), a sleazy strip-joint owner, have just embezzled "$2,147,000 and change" from Charlie's boss (Randy Quaid) — the kind of guy who doesn't stop shooting people or breaking their legs for the holidays. Since they can't get out of town until dawn, the cooler-headed Vic tells his higher-strung partner to just "act normal."

Of course, Charlie proceeds to do everything but.

Platt plays Charlie's even drunker pal; their stumbling odyssey through the sleet seems to be there simply to pad the film's mercifully slim 88 minutes. As Wichita's femme fatale, Connie Nielsen, in Veronica Lake peek-a-boo hair, is one of the better things in the movie.

Cusack looks lost, as well he should since there's nothing here for him to play, just a lot of bad jokes and conversations with strippers complaining they don't want to work on Christmas Eve while they grope their poles. Billy Bob looks bored, as he should since he's already done this character in "Bad Santa" (good) and "Bad News Bears" (bad).

Given what he's asked to do (roll around on the floor in his boxers, for one), fat-boy Platt should look enormously embarrassed, but then, he probably thought the humiliation he suffers here is nothing compared to what happens in the upcoming "Casanova."

Neither funny enough nor black enough, "The Ice Harvest" is a lazy, haphazard picture that spins its wheels like a Kia on an icy road.