Out Cold (2001)

Voices: Jason London, Lee Majors, Willie Garson
Director: Emmett Malloy & Brendan Malloy

Rating: PG-13

Studio: Touchstone

Review Posted: 11.21.01

Spoilers: Nothing out of the ordinary

Rating: 0.5/4

By Craig Younkin.

"Out Cold" is an amateurish-looking teen comedy directed by The Malloys, a brother duo seemingly trying to be like the other famous brothers, "The Farrellys".

This ski comedy takes place on Alaska's Bull Mountain, a ski resort founded by a man who would ride the slopes with a beer bottle in his hand and his pants pulled down to half mass. After he died, his weenie son (Willie Garson) took over the resort and hired four slackers named Rick (Jason London), Luke (Zach Galifianakis), Anthony (Flex Anderson), and Pig Pen (Derek Hamilton) to help him run the place.

But as it is, the Mountain is no longer profitable so he sells it to rich ski mogul John Majors (coincidentally played by Lee Majors). Major's first goal is to change everything, something that the slackers don't like so they finally decide to stop acting like drunken losers long enough to stop Major's from turning the Mountain into a classy looking ski resort, rather than a dingy looking shack town.

A couple of other sub plots include Rick having to decide which woman (out of two) he wants to date, a gay bartender in denial, some weirdo who isn't even developed well enough to pinpoint occupation, and two brothers who seriously need to find girlfriends.

All of these people are played to irritatingly idiotic perfection. And the way blacks and women are portrayed in this film may offend many. Sitting through an almost non-existent plot with characters this one-dimensional is always death.

This film is also painfully unfunny. Most of the jokes, which of course center around the penis and buttocks, are just thrown into the movie without the least bit of sense or directorial ambition. It wants to be raunchy, but the film squanders many of its possibilities by rushing through or ending a scene way too quickly. All this movie does is look really dumb.

About the only thing easy to sit through in this terribly long-feeling hour and a half film is the snowboarding. As long as the characters aren't talking or the movie isn't trying to be funny, "Out Cold" is actually kind of fun. Only sadly, there are only about two scenes where that happens. The result is a film that wipes out way more than the snow boarders do.

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