Out Cold (PG-13) ★½
It's all about fresh powder, cold beer and hot chicks for the snowboarders at Bull Mountain--until a big-city bigwig shows up in a cowboy hat and a stretch Hum-vee to turn their beloved Bull into you-know-what.
Story
Snowboarding buddies Rick (Jason London), Luke (Zach Galifiakis), Anthony (Flex Alexander) and Pig Pen (Derek Hamilton) live to ride and ride to live in their small Alaskan community around Bull Mountain, where they work odd jobs in between their partying and goofing off. Rick's even got a thing going with the cute girl at the ski rental shop, Jenny (A.J. Cook), even though he can't seem to get over Anna (Caroline Dhavernas), the dream girl who dumped him. But their life of leisure is about to change. Plans are in the works to sell the mountain to scheming Colorado ski mogul Jack Majors (Lee Majors), who rocks their isolated world when he arrives with big plans to change Bull Mountain from a beer-and-pretzels backwater to a champagne-and-caviar resort. Complicating matters even more, Majors brings along his two daughters, Inga (Victoria Silvstedt) and--to Rick's astonishment--Anna.
Acting
The acting's as good as can be expected from a snowbound sex comedy. As the movie's lead, London is cute and appealing in that nice-guy, take-home-to-mom kind of way. He's a fresh face who bears watching in the future. His buddies are mostly forgettable--Hamilton as Pig Pen has spent way too much time studying Crispen Glover; Galifiakis' too-typical gross-out comic relief is relegated to penis jokes and bestiality (that's right, bestiality); Alexander is a nervous Nellie afraid to get back on his board after an accident. Some characters are meant to be over the top, which is exactly how the actors play them: especially the gay and in denial bartender (David Denman) and Inga the bodacious blonde bunny who can ride the bar's mechanical bull with the best of 'em and will have sex in front of strangers just to piss off Daddy. Everything involving her character is worthless. Majors is sleazily campy, with his 10-gallon hat, yellow stretch Hummer and loathsome yuppie 'tude.
Direction
There have been worse first efforts than Out Cold, the debut movie for newbie directors Emmett and Brendan Malloy, but there've also been better. The trailer touts the boarders as ''the best of the best'' with wild snowboarding stunts, but in the movie, you'd never know it--you never see them ride. With the exception of Rick, they're more like ski bums than boarders. The beginning of this movie is shamefully bad with some really lame gags, like the scene where Pig Pen rescues of a bunch of scantily clad girls trapped in a gondola. There's also a scene with a polar bear doing unmentionable things to a half-naked and passed-out Luke. But don't let the first few scenes convince you to walk out. There are some clever lines (when Anna comes to town, Rick says, ''Of all the bars in all the mountain towns she could've walked in to, she walked into mine'') and overall, it's a cute story with a good heart.
Bottom Line
If you're a teenage boy--or just think like one--you'll like this sex-and-snow-filled romp.
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