It’s Christmas Eve in Wichita, and lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) has just stolen $2 million from his mob boss client Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid). With his strip cub owner partner Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) keeping him calm, Charlie is looking forward to finally getting out of Kansas, and nothing and nobody is going to slow him down.

Well, maybe club manager Renata (Connie Nielsen), she’s always been able to twist Charlie into knots just with the subtle twist of a well-manicured finger. And his former best friend Pete Van Heuten (Oliver Platt), a rotund drunk currently married to Arglist’s ex-wife, wants to make up over cocktails, hoping his lawyer pal can give him a shoulder to cry on for the holidays. Then there is Guerrard, he and his enforcer back in town looking to pay Charlie a visit. All of them have a way of stopping the would-be criminal in his tracks, and with Vic acting more than a bit slippery and the rest of the people around him forcing him to pay attention to them getting out of Wichita might be the least of Arglist’s worries. In fact, if he’s not careful and doesn’t stop acting like a country bumpkin, Charlie will be lucky if he makes it through Christmas Eve alive, let alone a millionaire.

Needless to say, Harold Ramis’ new coal-black comedy “The Ice Harvest” is not your grandma’s Christmas movie. Based on the book by Scott Phillips and with a screenplay be Oscar-winners Richard Russo and Robert Benton, this is a frigid holiday noir as cold and as heartless as the frozen rain drowning Charlie’s escape. It is the antidote to everything bright and sunny, counter programming to the typical Thanksgiving entertainment that’s sent out there this time of year engineered to make people smile.

And that’s a good thing. There is nothing wrong with a politically incorrect comedy unafraid to lift its middle finger straight up towards the holiday status quo. Heck, Thornton himself did this recently as the star of the agonizingly funny “Bad Santa,” another dark satire of the holidays that had the tenacity to make fun of everyone and everything associated with the over-commercialized celebration. But whereas that Christmas comedy had originality and Terry Zwigoff’s crisp direction, “The Ice Harvest” has only noir clichés and an out-of-his element Ramis to help it along. It is tired and not very funny, and with so many talented people coming together to make it work this isn’t just a surprise it’s a Yule-tied tragedy.

Don’t blame Cusack, he’s wonderful. The actor is as good as ever, winding Charlie into such ever-increasing exasperated knots I found myself slightly shocked he didn’t look like a pretzel. Platt’s even better, the veteran funnyman given his best role in ages. A journey home for Christmas Eve dinner with Charlie is a real highpoint, the look on his wife and stepparents’ faces perfectly priceless as he ravages their evening in a matter of milliseconds.

The rest do what they can, but Russo and Benton’s script is so obvious there’s almost nothing any of them can do to enliven it. Thornton, in particular, has done this type of thing far too much of late, while Nielsen just looks plum embarrassed walking around on her stilettos and fixing her ruby red lipstick. They don’t care about their characters and it shows, and the longer they stay onscreen the more apparent it becomes. You get the feeling they both wished they were someplace else, and goodness knows after about thirty minutes I was right there wishing along with them.

As for Ramis, it is almost as if the director spent all his creative energies directing Bill Murray in 1993’s “Groundhog Day” and helping Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd et al bring “Ghostbusters” to the screen in 1984. After that former classic it has been all downhill for the formerly reliable filmmaker (think “Multiplicity”), and as uneven his handling of things here is it is hard not to think this spiral is going to continue ever downward for the foreseeable future. None of the beats are right, the film’s movement turgid and tired. Worse, Ramis plays it all like a bad made-for-cable late night television thriller, only enlivened every now and then by Platt’s eccentricities or Cusack’s morose deadpanning.

It isn’t terrible. There is one brief sequence between Charlie and Vic with a hitman trapped in a metal box that’s a discomforting surrealistic hoot. The final sequence is also a good one, leading to a reveal that, it must be admitted, really did make me smile. But these moments are few and far between, the majority of the picture nothing more than a nice idea tied to bits and pieces I’ve seen far too many times before in better movies. It’s disappointing and, worse, the whole thing is borderline insulting, making “The Ice Harvest” noting more then an empty-headed pickup stranded in noir limbo without anyplace interesting, or funny, to go.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)