2013 The Frozen Ground is a Sleazy Stinker That Reunites Con Air's Nicolas Cage and John Cusack For No Damn Reasons at All
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
I have a bit of a delicate constitution when it comes to matters of sexual assault and abuse, particularly where children are concerned. I can listen to true crime podcasts about the most horrific crimes known to man for hours at a time but if my wife is watching a documentary about a child molester or domestic abuser and it gets very dark I sometimes ask my wife to shut it off.
This happened most recently in the true crime docu-series Killer Sally and the Netflix blockbuster Dahmer. We made it through almost an entire episode of each show before I asked my wife to turn it off because it was too upsetting.
I figured that since my wife likes true crime podcasts and true crime entertainment that she might, at the very least, be willing to watch 2013’s The Frozen Ground with me since it deals with Robert Hansen, an unassuming, respected Alaska baker, husband and father who lived a seedy second life as a prolific serial killer who raped and hunted terrified young women like animals.
Hansen is a notorious figure in true crime circles and while my wife acquiesced to watching The Frozen Ground with me this time she was the one asking me to turn it off after about twenty minutes.
That’s partially because the film’s subject matter is unforgivably brutal and grim but also because The Frozen Ground is simply not a good movie.
I’ve watched a LOT of bad movies over the course of this project. A LOT. Seriously. Do you know how many bad movies John Travolta has made? A TON. He’s literally synonymous with terrible movies and flops. Nicolas Cage is similarly notorious for his poor choices in films and roles.
Yet The Frozen Ground stands out among the many, many abysmal motion pictures Travolta and Cage have made through its uniquely unappealing combination of sordid and bad.
In a weirdly meta move, Cusack stands outside the homes of the people he mass-murders here and plays Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Arms” on a boombox in the rain for them.
On paper, The Frozen Ground has promise as a riveting true life tale that reunites the stars of Con Air for a decidedly different tale of airborne criminality. But this time John Cusack plays the criminal and Cage the lawman.
In reality, however, The Frozen Ground is a muddled, underwhelming mess that feels like a cross between a television movie and a 1970s exploitation joint.
Though he was apparently offered the flashier role of Hansen, Cage instead chose to play Jack Halcombe, an Alaskan state trooper with a hokey backstory involving a doomed sister he could not save who left him with a lifelong desire to protect vulnerable women.
While investigating the murder of a dead woman half eaten by animals, the idealistic lawman comes into contact with Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens), a seventeen year old sex worker who narrowly escaped being murdered by Hansen.
Because of the young woman’s age and profession and Hansen’s good reputation Cindy has a hard time getting people to believe her story. She is a victim of Hansen and his unfathomable cruelty but also of institutional sexism and slut-shaming.
Life is almost impossibly difficult for sex workers in Alaska in the 1980s even without a crazed serial killer killing beautiful young women for sport. It was all too easy for vulnerable young women to disappear in the vast whiteness, victims of cold, animals or human predators.
The Frozen Ground wants to be a serious film about how law enforcement failed one woman in particular and women as a whole but it has the lurid, sensationalistic feel of a lesser 1970s blaxploitation movie largely devoid of African-Americans but full of sex, sleaze and crime even before Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson pops up halfway through unexpectedly as Cindy’s pimp.
Cusack’s performance as Hansen is all surface, a curiously one-note depiction of the murderous father as a purposefully bland and unremarkable monster of banality living in perpetual fear of that awful, inevitable moment when his double life would be exposed.
When Hansen is finally busted it should be a crowd-pleasing moment of schadenfreude. A man of almost inconceivable evil has been brought down yet it rings hollow because Hansen never comes off as anything more than a made-for-cable bogeyman.
The Frozen Ground is punishingly long at one hour and forty-five minutes but it would benefit from more scenes of Hansen’s boring everyday life as a businessman, husband and father. The gulf between the grey blob of a man Hansen pretended to be and his psychotic true self is horrifying but all we get here, really, is Hansen the crazed criminal.
Cage delivers a solid performance as a passionate man on a mission. Yet his presence presents a dilemma for the filmmakers. A flamboyant and entertaining turn from Cage would undoubtedly be distracting and inappropriate. This is, after all, ostensibly a serious film about serious crimes and a serious investigation. But if Cage is understated and restrained then what’s the point of casting him in the first place?
A solid lead performance by Cage is just about all The Frozen Ground has going for it, and you can find that in the vast majority of Cage’s films, almost all of which are better and less repellent than this direct-to-streaming abomination.
The Frozen Ground does not have enough creative or cultural value to make up for its sordid ugliness. It doesn’t really have any creative or cultural value at all. The film ends with a dedication to Hansen’s victims that feels more like an insult than a tribute. These poor women deserve to be remembered in a better film, one that doesn’t aim for Monster and end up with a slightly classier version of The Candy Tangerine Man.
The Frozen Ground’s Wikipedia page notes that despite going direct-to-streaming and getting mostly negative reviews, when the drama was added to Netflix in 2020 it was the most streamed movie of the week.
That’s surprising in that The Frozen Ground was a flop at the time of its release yet unsurprising because true crime thrives on Netflix and because audiences didn’t have to pay a penny extra to see a movie about a legendary serial killer starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack.
It doesn’t hurt that Netflix audiences also had the option to shut off The Frozen Ground or switch to something more appealing/less depressing. That’s what me and my wife did. I had to watch Kangaroo Jack for a Fatherly article and while that movie is also terrible it’s at least god-awful in a way that does not make me despair for humanity.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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