The Frozen Ground

Writer-director Scott Walker's The Frozen Ground is a grim police procedural, based on a gruesome true crime case involving serial killer Robert Hansen, who from 1971 to 1983, raped, mutilated, and murdered as many as 21 young women in Alaska—abducting his helpless victims, loading them onto his small plane, and taking them to his cabin before hunting them down like deer and elk. Two weeks before resigning from his post in Anchorage, the fictionalized character of State Trooper Sgt. Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage) is dispatched to bring the culprit to justice, thanks to information provided by an underage, drug-addicted stripper/prostitute (Vanessa Hudgens), who had been tortured and raped but managed to escape. Problem is: no one else believes her when she identifies bespectacled, mild-mannered bakery shop owner Hansen (John Cusack) as her assailant. Although Cage plays an intense, uptight, determined protagonist, viewers already know that he will succeed in his grisly quest, leaving little sense of dread or tension in this derivative, cliché-filled, wannabe thriller. Not a necessary purchase. (S. Granger)