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Out Cold

2001, Movie, PG-13, 90 mins

Out Cold: Review

OUT COLD
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The ultimate in niche marketing: a snow-sports film for audiences too old for Nickelodeon Movies' PG-rated SNOW DAY but too young for the R-rated breast-fest HOT DOG... THE MOVIE. How a salt-hungry polar bear giving oral sex to a depantsed snowboarder fits into that combination, however, is beyond us. Decent good-guy Rick (Jason London) and his demographic cross-section of buddies — African-American Anthony (Flex Alexander), female Jenny (A.J. Cook), party-guy Luke (Zach Galifianakis) and Luke's dim-bulb brother Pig Pen, né Pierre (Derek Hamilton) — are snowboarding instructors at Alaska's down-market Bull Mountain. The mountain's eccentric late owner, one Papa Muntz (the late Lewis Arquette), bequeathed this wonderland to his son (Willie Garson), who's now in the process of selling it to latte-minded mogul John Majors (Lee Majors). Majors arrives with his daughter Anna (Caroline Dhavernas) — who once had a three-week love affair with Rick in Mexico and broke his heart — and his stepdaughter Inga (Victoria Silvstedt, Playboy's 1997 Playmate of the Year), intending to turn Bull Mountain into an upscale resort. Unless, of course, Rick and company can stop him. Dim-witted even by adolescent gross-out-movie standards, this first feature from music-video and surfing documentary directors The Malloys (brothers Brendan and Emmett) is snow bad it hurts. (It's a measure of how clumsy their direction is when their own camera angles and cutting obscure the cheesecake potential of a scene involving a tight-sweatered Silvstedt and a bucking mechanical bull.) Many scenes either lead to lame punchlines or peter out with no punchline at all, while characters don't interact so much as collide into one another like bumper cars. And while no one expects Noel Coward-like wit in a movie like this, the dialogue never rises above unimaginative exchanges like "Most people don't do the whole mountain in one day." "Well, I ain't most people." There's also an odd recurring riff on CASABLANCA ("Of all the bars in all the ski towns in Alaska..."), which we're sure all the 13- to 16-year-olds in the audience have seen. On the plus side, there's a mildly amusing GLADIATOR line and a few moments of genuinely funny, transgressive humor involving a disabled snowboarding champ (real-life, non-disabled champion Todd Richards). But even the snowboarding scenes that might have been the visceral heart of this thing are cut in such a way that we never get more than a few seconds of full-frame athletic skill; despite the real-life snowboarders doing the stunt work (including Rob "Sluggo" Boyce, Tara Dakides and Javas Lehn), it all looks like editing-room cheats. The village of Salmo, British Columbia, stood in for the fictitious locale. leave a comment --Frank Lovece
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