Movie review: Plot slips away in 'Thin Ice'

Greg Kinnear is one of the most effortlessly likable presences in movies today, which makes him especially good at playing creeps and oddballs. Whether it's the sex-addicted Bob Crane in the creepy-clammy biopic Auto Focus, the about-to-go-broke dad in Little Miss Sunshine, or the paranoid inventor in Flash of Genius, Kinnear is able to incarnate the most abominable, obsessive behavior imaginable -- and yet still make us care about the fate of his characters.

Given the right material, you can easily imagine him doing what Jimmy Stewart did in Rear Window and Vertigo -- and conjuring up a classic cinematic perv whom we'll never be able to shake from our memories.

The half-macabre, half-comic thriller Thin Ice isn't that movie. Directed by Jill Sprecher (Thirteen Conversations About One Thing), who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister Karen, the film plays like a poor-man's version of Fargo, complete with a snowy setting and a scheming central character who finds himself in way over his head.

Kinnear plays Mickey, an insurance salesman in Wisconsin, who thinks he can earn a quick buck by duping an old man (Alan Arkin) who owns a violin that's apparently worth a million dollars. Except when Mickey crosses paths with an unhinged burglar-alarm specialist (a very good Billy Crudup), Mickey's seemingly benign plan turns unexpectedly violent.

Or so it would seem. Perhaps needless to say, Thin Ice contains an inevitable surprise twist, one that attentive viewers will probably see coming a mile away. Yet as Kinnear scrambles around trying to figure out what's happening, there is little of the pleasure we usually enjoy watching an elaborate puzzle getting solved. Part of this is the Fargo factor: Kinnear's increasingly desperate character is too obviously modeled on the William H. Macy character in the Coen brothers' classic.

The bigger issue here, though, is that the screenplay is deeply implausible -- especially once all is revealed. Kinnear tries his hardest, and even manages to transform the initially contemptible Mickey into a pathetic figure worthy of our sympathy. But he can't obscure the fact that Thin Ice is fundamentally a cheat.

In trying to pull the wool over the audience's eyes, the filmmakers end up insulting our intelligence.

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