November 23, 2005 | It’s the night before Christmas, and all through Wichita, mob-connected lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is making all the wrong moves. He’s a bit too generous while picking up expenses for overworked dancers at a seedy topless bar, and much too eager to do a good deed for the bar’s sultry operator (Connie Nielsen). Worse, Charlie breaks a mutually-agreed-upon rule not to be seen in public with local porn impresario Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton).

Mind you, it’s not that either man is ashamed to be spotted with the other. (Truth to tell, Vic doesn’t appear capable of even faking shame.) It’s just that, well, the two guys have just ripped off $2 million “and some change” from the mob to which Charlie is connected. And it’s probably not a good idea for them to appear too friendly, too conspicuously, before they can quietly depart from Kansas with their ill-gotten gain.
 
Of course, it’s definitely a very bad idea for Charlie to start behaving like a guy who’s enjoying a few last laughs before leaving town. (Which, of course, he is. Or at least he thinks he is) One thing leads to another, and the increasingly rattled lawyer finds himself ever more stressed by close encounters with a boozy business associate (Oliver Platt) who’s unhappily married to Charlie’s ex-wife, a much too helpful cop (T.J. Jagodowski) who keep turning up like a refrain in a familiar song, and a burly mob enforcer (Mike Starr) with a frightful lack of holiday spirit. Ho, ho, ho? No way.
 
Charlie lurches through his long night’s journey toward a grimly gray dawn in The Ice Harvest, a gleefully nasty neo-noir dramedy set in a winter wonderland of amoral sleaziness.  Director Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day) takes a darkly comical and sometimes savagely sardonic approach to hardboiled pulp conventions. But the characters remain deadly serious – even while they spew foul-mouthed wisecracks – as they’re beset by betrayals, triple-crosses and out-of-left-field happenstances.

Time and again, scriptwriters Richard Russo and Robert Benton (working from a novel by Scott Phillips) set you up for a predictably cynical pay-off. But whenever they do, they follow up with something even more outrageous (and therefore all the more satisfying) as the ironies accumulate and the body count mounts. You can’t help suspecting that, if you weren’t laughing so hard at what they’ve done here, you might hear them giggling at your pop-eyed, open-mouthed surprise.

It’s hard to be more specific about the plot, or appreciative of the performances, without spoiling one or two of the movie’s clever curveball twists. Suffice it to say that, in this snow-blanketed corner of the lower depths, causing grievous bodily harm can sometimes qualify as a random act of kindness, and getting away with murder is a simple matter of great timing and dumb luck.