"The Frozen Ground," shot in Anchorage in 2011 with a number of local actors in supporting roles and crowd scenes, opened at The Vue Leicester Square in London, England, on Wednesday.
The film, starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack, is a movie version of Alaska's infamous "butcher/baker" Robert Hansen, convicted of killing several women in the 1980s. He was said to take them to remote locations, sometimes in his airplane, and hunt them down like game animals.
First reviews of the film look pretty good. Henry Fitzherbert in the Express calls it "a well crafted old-school thriller... tense, atmospheric and creepy." Josh Winning on the Total Film site says it's "handsomely lensed" but cliche-ridden.
"Cage is also having an off-day, chasing after John Cusack’s lady-killer with all the urgency of a sleepy warthog," Winning writes.
Tim Huddleston of Time Out London agrees the film has dull spots and breaks no new ground, frozen or otherwise, but says, "director Scott Walker holds things together proficiently, and there are enough twists to keep it rattling along."
Kim Newman of Empire Magazine also finds the movie fairly stock, but adds, "Still, there's plenty in this taut thriller for you to stick around for, not least the reuniting of the Con Air duo."
The movie will now hit screens in the UK, though the American release won't happen until Aug. 23.
Weston Coppola Cage, Danielle Friedman, Natasha Coppola-Shalom, Alice Kim and Nicolas Cage arriving for the premiere of The Frozen Ground 
