A hard-core first half is deflated by sleepy melodrama and a formulaic script in this adventure film about the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen.
Streaming on Netflix, “Against the Ice” gives the mission to secure Denmark’s claim to Greenland the survival flick treatment, and the explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen a glow up in the form of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”).
Though set in the early twentieth century, this Danish production by the filmmaker Peter Flinth has a slick digital sheen that makes the absence of technology feel like an accident. This anachronism looks cheap, and the script by Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick (based on Mikkelsen’s memoirs) checks all the boxes you might expect from an arctic adventure story — polar bear showdowns, starvation blues, yearning hallucinations of a woman.
In other words, it’s perfectly formulaic.
The film opens jarringly when a comrade returns to base camp from a failed expedition with his feet grossly frostbitten and swollen like plums, to which the steely Mikkelsen takes a machete. Dashing patriot that he is, Mikkelsen refuses to abandon the cause, though none of his men care to join him aside from Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), a chipper volunteer who doesn’t know what he’s in for.
In an effective, if transparently manipulative narrative element, the duo’s sled dogs are the prime casualties, and we witness their ranks whittle down in a variety of horrifying ways. Dog lovers beware: In one scene, a fazed Iversen must sacrifice one of the pups to provide food for the rest. Mikkelsen embodies this unapologetic survival instinct, and he’s not impressed with his sentimental partner.
The saintly younger man, however, puts up with his captain when he experiences visions of his girlfriend, and Flinth confusingly skips past swaths of time to cram in more moments of brotherly friction. Disappointingly, this shift from a relatively hard-core first half to a second bogged down by desultory dramatic beats significantly lowers the stakes. It’s a known fact that Mikkelsen and Iversen made it home, but “Against the Ice” doesn’t succeed in making us feel anything when they do.
Against the Ice
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
