On Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas, lawyer Charlie Arglist and pornographer Vic Cavanaugh prepare to leave town after stealing $2 million from their boss, mobster Bill Guerrard. However, icy roads means their getaway is postponed. Vic holds the cash when they split up, biding their time until the roads clear.
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 deduces he is hiding something. Charlie hints at the money, and she suggests they run away together. Taking advantage of the perceived situation, Renata asks Charlie to steal an incriminating photo of herself and a local politician from Vic.
After talking to his friend Sidney, a bartender and 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 graffito written in red sharpie on the wall above the urinal, "As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls". After evading Gelles, Charlie goes to a restaurant/bar, running into his friend Pete, who is married to Charlie's frigid ex-wife Sarabeth. Pete is 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 sharpie graffito above the phone. Charlie says that Gelles is in town, but Vic dismisses this, as Gelles has family in Wichita.
Charlie returns to Sweet Cage and gives Renata the photo. She says that Vic had called to warn Charlie that Gelles was indeed tailing them. Charlie takes Pete home only for Pete to vomit in Charlie's car and then pass out on the living room floor. Charlie then "borrows" a Mercedes Benz that Pete bought for Sarabeth, and goes to Vic's home. He finds Vic's wife next to their Christmas tree shot in the head. Vic arrives and reveals that he has locked Roy in a trunk. They take Roy and Vic's wife in the Mercedes and drive to 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 is shot open from the inside by Gelles, with Vic being shot in the process. After Gelles gets out, 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 him, so he drags Vic's wife to the collapsed dock and slides her into the lake, knocking the pleading Vic underwater. After discovering the money is not in Vic's bag, Charlie runs back to the dock to save Vic, but he has already drowned, 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 Charlie stabbed in the foot and Guerrard dead. Charlie and Renata go to her place, where he finds the money hidden in her closet while she takes a shower. It is revealed that Vic and Renata planned to run away together after killing Charlie. Renata tries to seduce him, but Charlie shoots her before she can cut his throat with a hidden straight razor.
While driving out of town with the money, Charlie sees Sidney on the side of the road with his kids in a motor home and stops to offer assistance. Sidney says that he is out of gas, so Charlie lets him syphon some out of the "borrowed" Mercedes. As Sidney tries to restart the RV, Charlie takes out a red sharpie and writes "As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls" on the back of the motor home, revealing it was Charlie who had been writing the graffito all along. Sidney gets the motor home started, and after accidentally knocking Charlie down when the RV lurches backwards, he 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.
Frequent Harold Ramis collaborator Bill Murray was originally offered the role of Bill Guerrard.[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.
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 47% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 134 reviews and an average rating of 5.50/10. The consensus states: "The Ice Harvest offers a couple of laughs, but considering the people involved, it should be a lot funnier."[6] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on 32 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[7]
James Berardinelli of Reelviews gave the film 2+1⁄2 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."[8]
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."[9]
Home media
The Ice Harvest was released on DVD and VHS on February 28, 2006, as part of the Focus Features Spotlight Series.[10] The DVD extras consist of alternate endings, outtakes, and making-of featurettes.[10]
