Don't Fear the 'Ice Soldiers'

You could describe Ice Soldiers (out now on Blu-ray and DVD) by saying it's like someone took some Cold War intrigue, the alien attack scenes from the original The Thing and some genetic reengineering from Universal Soldier and threw them in the script-o-matic movie blender, but that's making things sound a lot more interesting than they actually are.

The movie opens in 1962 and an entire arctic research station gets wiped out by an invasion of bleach-blond Russian super soldiers who look like an '80s synth band. Fifty years later, an oil exploration brings along a research scientist (Dominic Purcell from Prison Break) who seems to know a lot about what might've happened back in the day. He discovers three frozen bodies in the ice, they drag the bodies back to the camp and things melt, the bodies turn out to be the soldiers and then the soldiers reanimate and the kill-everyone-in-the-camp cycle starts all over again.

But Malraux (Purcell's scientist) is on to their killing ways and survives the attack and chases them across the tundra. The Russian soldiers don't realize the Cold War is over and that, as one seedy bar patron tells them, Russians are coming to North America and taking down the system through good old-fashioned organized crime. No military intervention necessary.

Any, Malraux teams up with random guy on a snowmobile (Adam Beach from Flags of Our Fathers) to track down and eliminate the Soviet threat. And there's a big plot twist at the end.

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Reading back over that plot summary makes this one sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. Ice Soldiers was made in Canada and features a lot of Canadian TV actors in supporting roles. No one's really bad in this movie but someone the whole thing seems pretty low stakes and borders on dull.

Still, if Soviet-era super soldiers who look like backup dancers for Tina Turner sounds like a good time, you might want to give it a try.