Hollywood needs Vanilla Ice’s acting talents about as much as it needs another Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen feature film. When one considers that the movie Cool As Ice essentially decapitated Vanilla’s career in one fell swoop, one can only consider it a mercy killing in hindsight.
The motion picture is a disaster not because it is so egregiously bad, but because it prances about under the assumption that it is outstandingly great. It assumes so unflinchingly that Vanilla Ice is the James Dean of his generation that it degrades into embarrassingly tacky posturing and never returns to earth again. All of the performers are laidback and ineffectual, and the plot is flimsier than the toilet paper it surely must have been typed on.
Vanilla plays Johnny, a rebellious youth with shaved eyebrows, colourful parachute pants, and a fancy motorbike. He sets his sights on Kathy (or, as he calls her, “Kat”) one day, after miraculously jumping a fence on his bike and consequently knocking her off of her horse. Kat (Kristin Minter) is a well-off brainiac but is a hot sweetheart deep down.
Kathy’s boyfriend Nick gets jealous of Johnny and we’re given lots of advance warning that he’s supposed to be an even bigger jerk than Vanilla, so when the Iceman cometh to lay the smackdown we know who we’re supposed to root for. Meanwhile, Kat’s parents (Michael Gross and Candy Clark) have to muddle through a terrible subplot about witness protection programs and the abduction of their son Tommy. After some juvenile flirting with Kat, Johnny and his motorbike save the day, prompting Michael Gross to get to deliver an “I was wrong about you, Johnny” Dirty Dancing-style apology.
One of the things that surprised me the most about Cool As Ice was the man behind the lens. The cinematographer is the Oscar-winning Janusz Kaminski, a longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator and arguably among the best in the business. How director David Kellogg was ever able to secure the man who would go on to shoot Schindler’s List one year later is beyond me.
The less said about the performances, the better. Whether he’s playing hide and seek with Kat at a construction site for a new house or not-so-suavely taking his shirt off, Vanilla delivers a howlingly sour one-note performance that would make Ben Stein look like a charismatic fellow. And since the movie is basically structured completely around the Iceman, the result is a frozen cast that never thaws itself out.
Since the script has barely enough to merit 20 minutes of screentime, Cool As Ice is toploaded with terrible dance and rap tunes from the early 90’s by forgotten artists in order to fill itself out. It’s here that the bad acting is complemented by even worse singing and dancing, permanently solidifying Ice’s now legendary reputation as a flash in the pan. The world may not have ever needed a movie as brutally bad as Cool As Ice, but I’m just glad it never spawned a sequel. That would have sucked to the extreme. Yep yep.
