The Ice Harvest

On Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas, mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (Cusack) and pornographer Vic Cavanaugh (Thornton) prepare to run away with $2 million from their boss, mobster Bill Guerrard (Quaid). Icy roads means their getaway is posponed. Vic holds the cash while they split up and try to evade being captured.

Charlie visits Sweet Cage, a local strip-club owned by Vic and run by Renata Crest, a woman whom Charlie has long lusted after. She quickly sees he's hiding something. He hints at the money, and she suggests they run away together. However, she asks Charlie to first steal an incriminating picture of herself and a local politician from Vic.

After talking to his friend Sidney, a bouncer at Sweet Cage, Charlie goes to another strip club owned by Vic, the Tease-O-Rama, and takes the photo from a safe. Before he can leave, Roy Gelles, one of Guerrard's enforcers, arrives, looking for Charlie. Charlie hides in the men's restroom as Gelles enters. Roy reads aloud a saying written in red marker on the wall above the urinal. After evading Gelles, Charlie goes to a local restaurant/bar, running into his friend Pete, who is married to Charlie's ex-wife Sarabeth. Pete is very drunk, and decides to tag along with Charlie for as long as it takes to pass out. Charlie calls Vic from a pay phone, seeing the same red marker message above the phone. He frantically tells Vic that Gelles is in town, but Vic dismisses this, as Gelles has family in Wichita.

Charlie gives Renata the photo, and she tells him that Vic had called to warn that mob enforcer Roy Gelles was tailing them. Charlie takes Pete home. then "borrows" a Mercedes Benz originally bought for Sarabeth, and goes to Vic's. He finds Vic's wife dead, shot in the head. Vic arrives and reveals that he's locked Roy in a large trunk. They take Roy and Vic's wife in the Mercedes and head for a lake, while Roy continues yelling at them from the trunk, claiming that it was Vic who shot his wife. Vic gets annoyed and shoots the trunk, silencing him.

As Charlie and Vic get the trunk onto the lake dock, it's shot open from the inside by Gelles, with Vic being shot in the process. After Gelles gets out of the trunk a standoff ends with Roy dead and Vic falling into the frozen lake as the dock collapses. Charlie realizes that Vic was going to kill and double-cross him, so he drags Vic's wife to the collapsed dock, sliding her into the lake, knocking the pleading Vic underwater. When Charlie discovers the money isn't in the bag, he runs back to the dock to save Vic, but he has already gone under in the freezing water, entwined with his dead wife.

Returning to Sweet Cage, Charlie finds that Guerrard himself has come to town, and has tied up Renata. A struggle ensues, ending with Guerrard's death. Charlie and Renata go back to her place, where he finds the money hidden in her closet while Renata showers. Via flashbacks we see Charlie realizing that Vic and Renata planned to run away together after killing him. Charlie shoots her before she can get him with a hidden straight razor.

As Charlie is driving out of town with the money, he sees Sidney on the side of the road with his kids in a motor home. Charlie stops to offer assistance. Sidney says that he is out of gas, so Charlie lets him syphon some. As Sidney is trying to restart the home, Charlie takes out the red Sharpie and again writes "As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls" on the back of the RV, as he had been writing it all over town. Sidney gets the motor home started, accidentally knocks Charlie down, and drives away.

Charlie gets up and returns to the "borrowed" Mercedes. Pete wakes up in the back seat, and the duo drive away together for warmer weather.

• John Cusack as Charlie Arglist
• Billy Bob Thornton as Vic Cavanaugh
• Connie Nielsen as Renata Crest
• Randy Quaid as Bill Guerrard
• Oliver Platt as Pete Van Heuten
• Mike Starr as Roy Gelles
• Ned Bellamy as Sidney
• T.J. Jagodowski as Officer Tyler
• David Pasquesi as Councilman Williams

Frequent Harold Ramis collaborator Bill Murray was reportedly offered a role.[2][3][4] Monica Bellucci was originally set to play the role of Renata, but had to leave due to her pregnancy. Ramis almost had to close production for a day due to the weather, which would have spoiled his tradition of never losing a shooting day.

Filming took place in the suburbs of Chicago.[5]

The DVD 'extras' consist of:

• Alternate ending, number 1: has Charlie getting injured when Ned backs into him, then eventually walking away into an empty field.
• Alternate ending, number 2: also has Charlie getting injured when Ned backs into him, but as he lays there, he recalls a day in Renata’s bar with Vic, when Vic asks Renata if she ever performs nude for her customers, as Charlie is curious. Renata asks Charlie if that’s what he wants, and he replies, ‘Gosh, only if you want to.’ She admonishes them to go home, but they talk a bit, and then Charlie pitches his ‘idea’ to Vic. Charlie is then back in the present, walking away into the empty field.
• A short outtake performed by Thornton in his Sling Blade character 'Karl Childers' persona (voice), to the amusement and laughter of the assembled cast and crew.
• A 17-minute featurette about the film, with author Phillips and screenwriters Russo and Benton.
• A 13-minute featurette about the film, with the principal cast, director, and producers, about the character's motivations and personalities, Ramis’s reasons for using Chicago (his home town) suburb locations to represent Wichita Falls, the film noir aspects of the picture, and cinematographer Kivilo’s choice of colors used and captured on film.
• A 6-minute featurette about the lake/dock scene – how it was constructed and filmed and what and how special effects were used, including using paraffin to represent ice.
• Director’s commentary.

The Ice Harvest opened in 1,550 theaters in North America and grossed $3.7 million, averaging $2,413 per theater and ranking 10th at the box office. The film ultimately earned $9 million in the US and $1.1 million internationally for a total of $10.2 million.[1]

The film has a rating of 45% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 130 reviews and an average rating of 5.5 out of 10. The consensus states: "The Ice Harvest offers a couple of laughs, but considering the people involved, it should be a lot funnier."[6]

James Berardinelli of Reelviews gave the film 2 and a half stars out of four, saying, "Despite its brevity, it seems padded, with all sorts of irrelevant scenes and dead-end subplots taking up time. [...] Next time, Ramis should work to his strengths, and film noir isn't one of them. The Ice Harvest will have melted away long before the turkey leftovers are polished off."[7]

Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and said: "I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die. I liked it for Charlie's essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas. And for the scene-stealing pathos of Oliver Platt's drunk, who like many drunks in the legal profession achieves a rhetorical grandiosity during the final approach to oblivion. And I liked especially the way Roy, the man in the trunk, keeps on thinking positively, even after Vic puts bullets through both ends of the trunk because he can't remember which end of the trunk Roy's head is at. Maybe it's in the middle."[8]

The film was released on both DVD and VHS on February 28, 2006 by Universal Home Entertainment.

• Official website
• The Ice Harvest at IMDb
• The Ice Harvest at AllMovie
• The Ice Harvest at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Ice Harvest at Metacritic
• The Ice Harvest at Box Office Mojo