Ice Soldiers Blu-ray (review).
Dominic Purcell is the hero of ‘Ice Soldiers’, a movie with a ridiculous plot, which is a bit of a pity because he doesn’t really have a chance to display any acting ability. This is a really abysmal movie which, although entertaining in bits, lacks any sense of reality. We’ve also got Michael Ironside, the hard man of action movies, now limited through age and lack of opportunity. ‘Ice Solders’ should never have been defrosted and I’m about to tell you why this is the case!
It’s difficult to say a great deal about the proceedings because the plot is rather sparse and it would be very easy to give away the story. Sufficient to say, you get used to one lot of characters only for them to be wiped out and then 50 years later, for another lot to meet the same grisly end. Who is wiping them out? During the Cuba crisis in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev was a bit peeved and decided to get his own back by sending three genetically modified soldiers to New York to create havoc and mayhem. Apparently, it was an old Nazi plan hijacked by the Soviets after the war and three guys, robotic soldiers with super-abilities, were trained to be super-Vikings. All they wanted to do was kill, rape and plunder.
Such a concept is completely and utterly ridiculous. At that time, the Soviets had no idea about genetics in a Lysenko doctrine which was ideological motivated and about 200 years out of date. In the 30s, the murder of millions of their own citizens in a Stalinist agricultural policy governed by genetics which they thought ought to be right but wasn’t constituted a travesty of injustice. Starvation and destitution resulted from the agricultural policies driven by Lysenko and his theories of evolution! Therefore, there is absolutely no way the Soviets would have been able to create genetically modified soldiers and additionally, 1962 was just a dozen years after the discovery of DNA.
However, the soldiers themselves are ridiculous. They look like Dolph Lundgrens! While one of them was bad enough some years ago fighting Jean-Claude Van Damme, three of them is maybe just too much to bear. Notwithstanding frozen acting, the plane delivering them to New York crashes in the Arctic. The soldiers are discovered and taken to a base after which they escape and kill everybody but rape one of the female scientists into the bargain. The woman has a son. How this plot ever got written, I don’t know but it transpires without any imagination that the son is the scientist who, 50 years later, searches the Arctic for the frozen soldiers. Of course, he has some of his father’s abilities but isn’t completely a chip off the old block.
More carnage and mayhem and murder! Malraux the scientist meets up with a drifter called TC Cardinal played by Alan Beach. At least, this character is believable and well acted, unlike the other wooden caricatures splattered throughout the movie! Meanwhile, the three Lundgrens create a lot of trouble in an Arctic town, even getting into rap music as well. The latter just finished it off completely. This should have been the end of the movie but I’m afraid it went on a little more down the line of dismal absurdity.
Made in Canada, it is shot mainly in cold conditions, so don’t watch it if you’re feeling chilly. If you’re feeling bored, don’t watch it because you will end up committing hari-kari, it’s that bad. Sorry, but ‘Ice Soldiers’ is definitely one to miss! As for extras on the Blu-ray, I didn’t find any on the review copy and frankly, would you really want them? Enough is enough, I’d say.
Rod MacDonald
April 2014
(region 2 Blu-ray: pub: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. 1 disk 91 minutes. Price: £10.25 (UK). ASIN: B00I8FECBC
subtitles: English, Hindi and Hearing Impaired: English)
cast: : Dominic Purcell, Camille Sullivan, Adam Beach, Michael Ironside and Gabriel Hogan
check out website: www.sonymasterworks.com