Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had hoped for just one thing: that this movie would NOT glorify the persons involved, the crimes committed, nor the place where they occurred. I wasn't disappointed, for it was not a "glorified" time in our city. Rather, it was a lengthy span of too many months, seasoned with fairly regular, albeit minimal, media blurps that yet another girl had "gone missing." "The Frozen Ground" has captured the ambience of those sinister times when we learned to question who we knew and where and how they were spending their time away from the comforts of home and hearth. Amongst ourselves, we spoke in near whispers about common friends with quirky personalities, as we waited for the next "announcement" of a body found, or of a dancer who didn't show up for work. For all of its horrors, this is a grim and quiet film -- the story of a quiet investigation of a quiet businessman with a terrifying secret life. Alaska's magnificent wilderness plays an honest role, too: cold, dark, menacing, where it's easy to disappear, where life is reduced to its lowest terms and survival will always reign supreme, where Hansen's prey didn't stand a chance. And it's accurate. That really IS downtown Anchorage, and that IS the Knik River Bridge. It's the real Flattop Mountain in the foreground of the nighttime view of Anchorage. And, yes, that IS the Alaska State Trooper building. There really WAS a "Wild Cherry" nightclub (and a couple of dozen more, just like it), the dancers were topless (and usually bottomless), and those ARE real photos of Hansen's victims hanging on the Troopers wall. More could have been told of Hansen's earlier life, but simply wasn't. John Cusack is positively superb in the role, and Nicholas Cage is brilliant as the committed and caring cop who insists that all of the puzzle pieces are in plain view from the start. Five stars for this one, laced with a big dose Alaskan pride and prejudice.