When should a director be shamed for their vision? If you’re a gentle, even benevolent soul, you might say that artists would rarely, if ever, be shamed for the art that they create. The Streaming Hell series has long been a clearing house for the forgettable, the terrible, the films that probably never should have existed. However, at the end of the day, we all make mistakes, and some people fail to make the movie that they really wanted to make. Circumstance and fate make us all its bitches, especially those who attempt to make a plan. As the old adage goes: Man plans, God laughs.
But there’s another phrase that came to mind in the process of writing this review of the 2010 film Ice Castles: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Ice Castles (2010) is a remake of a 1978 film of the same name, and that is perfectly fine: no film is truly above being remade, especially long-forgotten sports films. What makes Ice Castles (2010) worthy of examination is that its director, Donald Wrye, is also the director of Ice Castles (1978) — meaning that it’s not just a bad movie, and not just a bad remake, but it’s a rare example of a movie in which the director of the original film was given the opportunity to try again, and stripped their work of anything that made it worthy of revisiting in the first place.
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t recognize Wrye’s name. Outside of Ice Castles, his main claim to fame is the made-for-TV movie Born Innocent (1974). It’s a film which featured a young Linda Blair (fresh off The Exorcist) being sexually assaulted so graphically, the scene in which it happened was immediately cut from the film, though NBC were later unsuccessfully sued because of copycat crimes that occurred afterward. Ice Castles, Wrye’s very first theatrically released (read: not-made-for-TV, as 99% of his films are) came four years later, but its wholesomeness feels like Wrye’s way of swinging the pendulum of taste back the other way. Maybe that’s why he chose to revisit the story 30 years later: free from the then-recent shadow of Born Innocent, he was also free to reexamine a story that feels this pure and, well, innocent.
The plot is the stuff Lifetime Original Movies are made of: a young figure skater Lexi (played by current skater Taylor Firth in the remake and known as Lexie in the original, then played by recently retired skater Lynn-Holly Johnson) enters the world of competitive skating and chooses her ascent to fame above her family and boyfriend, Nick (Robby Benson in 1978 and John Dies at the End’s Rob Mayes in 2010). That is, until the unthinkable happens: an accident on the ice ruptures a blood clot in her brain, rendering her completely blind. With the help of Nick and her skating coach, she regains her confidence to overcome her new disability and takes home a medal.
Still, the question sings: why did Wrye decide to tell this story twice? Was it his attempt at forcing an A Star is Born? Was he inspired by some unknown skater who, at a midpoint early in her career, took a blinding bonk to the ol’ nog, only to overcome it and skate in a sectional competition? The internet seems clear that this is entirely fictional — the IMDb page’s frequently asked questions dryly states “ Ice Castles is obviously not a true story.” If you’re not careful, this question may gnaw at you, slipping j to your mind when you least expect it. It’s an unexpectedly fascinating riddle from a most unlikely source.
Though the original film isn’t exactly a classic, it isn’t half-bad, either — in another life, it’s easy to imagine it having longevity as one of the better skating films made. For starters, Lexi’s dad is played by none other than Tom Skerritt! For another, master cinematographer Bill Butler (who was also the cinematographer of classics like Jaws, Stripes, three different Rocky movies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) handled this film, helping to elevate it from being a low-budget sports/romance into something that actually feels worthy of remembering. Its skate scenes are shot beautifully, with its crowd reaction shots expertly placed to help you get in the heads of everyone watching her. We watch Lexie grapple with the attention she’s getting, and struggle with the backlash that comes with it. You also really get a feel for the family dynamics between Lexie and her family — when they argue, it feels like an actual argument. When Lexie and Nick rekindle their romance, it feels like the natural result of his dedication to helping her recover, and her dedication to letting him past her own anguish — and when she comes out on top at the end, it feels like reaching the end of a road that she fought to walk (or skate) down.
Our Ice Castles has absolutely none of that: the chemistry between its assorted players feels wooden and quarter-baked, and its dialogue is often naturalistic to the point of feeling amateurish and clunky. When we watch Lexi and Nick argue, it’s impossible to register the presence of passion because it just feels like two people saying lines. When they reconcile, it feels equally unnatural, as though the only reason for it to happen was because the script called for it. This is true of everyone around Lexi — We get no sense for who they are as people or characters, no reason for them to be who they are. Instead, they feel like cardboard obstructions that surround Lexi, devoid of anything resembling depth. Even the other skaters around her feel procedurally generated, their taunts and bullying feeling like what would happen if a chatbot were instructed to dunk on the weird kid.
Though Nick is a strong contender for the worst character in Ice Castles, Lexi’s father gives him a real run for his money. Even when she’s blind, it’s hard to understand why Lexi isn’t reacting to the way her father treats her. This anger was originally the haven of Lexi’s coach, Beulah, who stokes the fire needed to convince her to claw herself back to the ice — when she tells Lexi, “I used to think you were special, but you’re just like the rest of us: an invalid,” you can feel the fury rise inside of you. Here, though, her father is incapable of such nuance; days after returning to her home, her father screams at her for feeling defeated about her blindness, forcibly dragging her out of bed. Where does he drag this newly-blind teenager? Onto the ice, of course! If you’re wondering if that’s a safe thing to do, it gets better: when asked if the ice is even thick enough to skate on, his response: “I guess we’ll find out.” All of this might be forgivable if the skating scenes were solid enough to carry us through the hokey acting, but they are, put simply, not. They’re all terribly shot, and range from “obstructed by people and objects” to “shaky handheld from someone who clearly wasn’t given the right shoes to film on ice.” The editing of these scenes, too, is atrocious — the cuts are erratic and sometimes come in the middle of Lexi in action, which is motion sickness-inducing and baffling all at once.
The biggest issue is with the pacing. With a movie that tells this kind of story, you’re dealing with a balancing act: if tragedy strikes too fast it’ll be a bummer, but if it’s too late, it’ll feel meaningless. Ice Castles takes the latter road, positioning Lexi’s tragedy (which is just her falling on the ice, but bonking her head once while she was down) an hour into a 95-minute movie. It doesn’t go out of its way to explain what happened — it just expects you to accept that a single bonk was enough to rob her of her eyesight altogether. Its ‘78 counterpart waits a comparative length of time for the same fall, but it spends enough time building the world around Lexie (and her growing disconnect from it) that when she takes the substantial tumble that renders her blind, it feels like the movie has earned our empathy for its protagonist.
Miraculously, the film’s final skate sequence is the one that sticks the landing. During her final competition performance, we watch her performing the routine in the arena cut with moments of her doing the same routine on the Iowa pond where the film starts. It feels almost like Wrye cheaped out on every other aspect of this movie, just to adequately budget for this one scene. This doesn’t make up for everything the film does wrong — in fact, I’d argue that it does as much wrong as it possibly could, especially considering this is a second chance at making it — but for just one scene, it feels like they understood their assignment. Even still, though, you get the sense that she didn’t actually work that hard to get back on the ice.
In some ways, it feels almost distasteful to be so critical of Wrye, or Ice Castles and its players. For one, it was his final film before his death in 2015. For another, Firth is a professional skater, and Ice Castles is the only acting role she’s ever done — should we really expect greatness from someone who doesn’t even have a photo on their IMDb page? Sure, Johnson wasn’t an actor, either, but at least she made a go of it after her Ice Castles! At the end of the day, though, Wrye is the most worthy of blame for how this movie turned out. In between the original version and his remake, he made a staggering 18 TV movies, meaning he had plenty of time to get very comfortable making movies. Ice Castles (2010) doesn’t feel like the reflection of a veteran director — instead, it leaves us wondering how the same person making the same movie 30+ years apart can use their second chance to make a film that is, by all conceivable metrics, vastly inferior to the work they made when they were young and inexperienced.
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