Ice Princess

Record lows: Ice Princess will melt your heart. Not really. It sucks

By Bob Grimm

Michelle Trachtenberg is a talented and cute-as-heck actress, and the prospects of her starring as an aspiring figure skater seem enticing. While Ice Princess occasionally soars behind her star power, a hack script acts like a steel baton to the knee, knocking it down to the cold ice with a resounding thud.

No doubt Trachtenberg worked her butt off for this film. Many of her moments on the ice are actually her (although a body double performs the difficult jumps and spins) and there's impressive commitment in her performance. Unfortunately, Ice Princess (terrible name for a movie) is done in by gooey Disney stuff. This is not some sort of realistic study of a young woman pursuing her dream. It's a hokey exercise taking a few too many cues from Tonya Harding, actually giving the sport a bad name.

Trachtenberg is Casey Carlyle, a genius physics student who decides to make the study of figure skaters her ticket into Harvard. She also likes to skate on the frozen pond in her backyard, so when she decides to take a few lessons and test her math theories on herself, she finds she's a natural. Screw that potential berth into one of the world's best educational institutions, there's some skating to be done!

Most ridiculous is Kim Cattrall's disgraced figure skater turned coach, a woman so reprehensible she sabotages Casey's chance for a tournament victory. Rather than cart her ass off to jail, this psycho character is redeemed by becoming Casey's coach. Forgiveness is a nice thing to preach to kids, but some felonies deserve straight-up jail time.

Trachtenberg is a charmer, but Ice Princess isn't nearly worth her presence. It does, however, boast an appearance by the great Brian Boitano, so at least it has that going for it. Boitano rules!