Icebreaker(2000)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

Shortly after Matt (Sean Astin) is captured in the ski resort’s Summit Restaurant by Grieg’s (Bruce Campbell) men while attempting to save his girlfriend Meg (Suzanne Turner) (who – along with her father Bill [Stacy Keach] – is among the patrons that Grieg and some of his men have taken hostage there), Grieg has Matt approach him. He first makes some cryptic comments about what he intends to do on this mountain before handing Matt a videotape and telling him that it will explain his actions, and he instructs him to make sure that he gets this into the right hands and promises that he will let Meg leave this mountain alive if he cooperates. After Matt exits the restaurant and grabs a snowboard to use, he runs into his park ranger acquaintance Beck (Mark “Woody” Keppel) a short distance away. He hands Beck the videotape and tells him to get it to the news crew at the bottom of the mountain before adding that he thinks that Grieg is about to do something terrible, then he walks back towards the restaurant. Beck decides to follow him.

While he and Beck are watching the hostages getting harassed inside the restaurant from afar, Matt calls the information desk at the mountain’s base so he can speak to his boss, Clay (Richard Kincaid). After getting Clay on the line, he tells him that he believes that Grieg is going to waste the mountain, then orders him to get the person in charge of the law enforcement officials down there on the phone. Clay responds by first rambling about how none of said officials will take action because he feels that they are scared, then he rambles about how the mountain’s business will likely suffer bad press from all of this. Thinking that Clay has lost his mind and won’t be of any great help, Matt hangs up on him, and this makes Clay very angry and prompts him to declare to his assistant Tilly (Melissa G. Lourie) that the mountain is his and that no one is going to blow it up (he had been informed about Grieg’s nuclear weapon by FBI Agent Langley [John James] shortly before Langley was killed by one of Grieg’s henchmen). He then goes into one of the police vans, takes a machine gun, and starts heading up the slope, and Tilly does likewise.

Matt and Beck sneak to the outskirts of the open area where Frantz (Paul Schnabel), Josh (Hasso Wolfe Wuerslin), and a bunch of other goons have the nuclear weapon ready to detonate, and Matt tells Beck that Grieg is undoubtedly going to use that nuke and points out the detonator resting on top of it. However, Beck tells him that he isn’t going to help him with whatever he intends to do next because he has a son to think about and how he is all that his son has in the world. Matt thus thanks him for his help up to this point, then tells him to get down the mountain as fast as he can because he has a feeling that all hell is about to break loose. After Beck runs off, Matt slides past the terrorists on his snowboard and snatches the detonator, then continues on down the slope. Before the villains pursue Matt on their skis and snowmobiles, Frantz radios to Grieg that a ski patroller has just taken the detonator, and Grieg realizes that Matt is the culprit. After contacting Sondra (Alison Lees-Taylor) over his radio and telling her that there is trouble at the nuke site and that she must get there, Grieg decides to make Matt pay for his actions by killing Meg. He thus grabs her, takes her outside, and locks her in one of the gondolas, then sticks a time bomb to it that is scheduled to explode in four minutes before sending it down the mountain. He then departs in the direction of the site where the nuke is being kept, and shortly after, Beck sees the predicament that Meg is in and decides to find Matt and alert him to it.

Bill soon stands up to the two goons left behind to watch him and the other hostages, and after distracting them with the truth about how they are just as dead as he and everyone else are, he disarms one of them and forces the other henchman to drop his weapon. He then orders them both to leave while they still can, and after they go, he directs the innocents to the gondolas so they can get off the mountain immediately. Meanwhile, Matt continues to evade the pursuing henchmen, as well as Sondra when she joins in on a snowmobile, until Beck timely appears on his own snowmobile and knocks Sondra off of hers. Matt then joins Beck, and Beck informs him about the danger that Meg is in. Matt hands him the detonator and tells him to get down to the cops, then resumes snowboarding down another path with Frantz chasing after him. Sondra starts to pursue Beck, and Beck desperately tries to ward her off by throwing random objects on his person at her. Nothing works until he throws the videotape at her, which hits her in her right eye, and she becomes so distracted by the pain that she is unable to avoid colliding with one of the gondola lift’s supporting towers directly ahead of her, and she dies in the resulting explosion. Moments after Beck stops to look at the aftermath, some cops find him.

Grieg arrives at the nuke site, and after seeing that the detonator has not been recovered and neither Frantz nor Sondra are answering his calls, he pulls out his gun and orders Josh and the other men present to get out of here, intending to shoot the nuke and make it explode that way. However, before Josh departs, he reminds Grieg that he made the nuke’s container bulletproof on his orders, so shooting it isn’t going to work. Moments later, Grieg casts his eyes back upon the restaurant and gets another idea. Meanwhile, Matt causes Frantz to knock himself out, and after he gets to where Meg is, he climbs up a supporting tower and hops onto her gondola’s roof as it passes by. He then hotwires the door to get it open, and they both jump down into the safety of the snow a couple of seconds before the bomb blows. They both then run out of the way of the wrecked gondola when it breaks off the wire rope and comes crashing down, though Matt hurts his right leg in the process. An awakened Frantz then appears driving a snowplow and starts chasing after them, but before he can run them over, he gets shot and killed from afar by Clay, and his limp body lets go of the control levers, shutting the vehicle down just as it is about to reach Matt and Meg. Clay then takes off with Tilly, intending to take out more of the terrorists.

Matt and Meg get Frantz’s body out of the snowplow and drive up to the restaurant in it, undoubtedly to save Bill and the other hostages (since they don’t know that Bill has already saved them), and they spot Grieg standing on the roof with a rocket launcher in his hands, having opted to blast the nuke with it from his position. He tells the two of them to run, but just as he is about to shoot, Matt pelts him with a snowball out of desperation. He laughs it off and resumes readying his weapon, but Matt’s act of desperation turns out to be a welcome way to delay Grieg; Bill suddenly appears behind Matt and Meg with a rocket launcher of his own, and he blows up both Grieg and the restaurant with a single shot. Bill hugs Meg and thanks Matt for saving her, and in turn, Matt thanks him for saving them.

Not long after, emergency personnel tend to the hostages while law enforcement officials find and arrest the surviving terrorists. Bill pours Matt and Meg some champagne, and when Matt officially asks him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he has no problem giving him his blessing. Matt kisses Meg to close out the film.