The Oddly Good "The Frozen Ground"

I'd had the Nicolas Cage and John Cusack crime drama The Frozen Ground in my Netflix queue for quite a while, but only recently was I bored and bereft enough of things to watch on my iPad in bed as I fell asleep to start it. Of course, most Netflix movies you start and lose interest in after ten minutes, because most of them are things that you really very much almost want to see. But to my surprise I watched this one the whole way through.

Everyone knows that Cage will do just about any project that offers him a paycheck, so it's no surprise that he brings his usual workmanlike presence to this movie. Outside of a few odd rejuvenated bits of inspired mania every few years, that's all he has left in him. But with this movie, it weirdly kind of works.

It's about real life serial killer Robert Hansen, who killed 17 women in Alaska in the 1970s. Cusack plays Hansen as a workmanlike serial killer, carrying out his compulsions like mandatory tasks, and not really enjoying any of it. We get no idea of why he does what he does. Cusack just seems glad to be playing a bad guy, and so doesn't really make an effort to understand who Hansen is, beyond a guy who mechanically goes about his grim duty of killing young women.

Beyond the two (former) A-list leads, the rest of the cast is far stronger than it has any right to be. Breaking Bad's Dean Norris and classic That Guy Kevin Dunn play cops who help Cage track down the killer; Radha Mitchell plays his wife; and Vanessa Hudgens plays the young prostitute who got away from Hansen and eventually helps to bring him down.

In her desire to jumpstart professional adulthood and seriousness, leaving behind the Disney stain, she's taken on a slew of prostitute, party girl, stripper and uglied up roles. What do you do when playing these extreme roles runs its course? What's the next step?

The plot is mainly about Cage's quest to get enough evidence to convince the District Attorney, played by yet another classic That Guy Kurt Fuller, to give him a search warrant for Hansen's house, since Cage is convinced he is the killer. It's all about paperwork, navigating bureaucratic processes, and keeping your own suspicions and agendas concealed in favor of going by the book.

Which is all to say that The Frozen Ground is among the most boring serial killer movies ever made. But there's something that just clicks about how the workmanlike attitude of the actors in the movie toward the project, the plot of navigating the labyrinths of bureaucracy, and the oddly begrudgingly committed nature of the killings themselves all sync up. Rarely do you find such a synchronicity between the motivations of the  hero and the villain, not to mention the actual actors playing them, and the real life story itself.  I sort of loved it.