This film starts with great promise. It even slides into the hour mark with great scripting and a wonderfully quirky tension that sets the film skating out with a gentle breeziness over the crackling ice. Cusack is good, he's always good -- fun, intelligent, empty (this character anyway). It's Christmas Eve night, and he seems to be set a waver between merely a shady lawyer and a hands-dirty underworld thug. What will become of him? Is he slowly growing a conscience or is he just scared? I like the way the film plays the audience.

But in the meantime and in a film about faulted thieves, Oliver Platt steals the show. He plays a man drunk and dangerously honest. Drunks can be difficult to tollerate, and people who pretend to be drunk on screen can be overbearingly tedious, but Platt is smashing (and the great dialogue), together they elevate this thus far 'B+' film far into 'A' territory. Unfortunately, Platt is not a fixture. As he departs, in comes Billy Bob (who is not at his best here), and shortly thereafter the writing falls apart. The script calls for the Cusack character to do something so utterly unbelievable, that I never find myself quite back into the film. The thin ice of the production itself breaks. What looked like an A, sinks to a B. Nor does the resolution of Cusack's plight bring much weight to the picture.

Too bad too, because I loved Groundhog Day, an absolute gem from the same director, Harold Ramis who remarks, "For me, the best comedy comes from reality. There's nothing that's written as a joke in The Ice Harvest; no one's trying to be funny. It's a film noir - with laughs."