There are people who hold every movie from their childhood sacred to the point where the idea of remaking one of them is pure blasphemy. I am not one of those people. Now, that is not to say that I like remakes. More often than not, they’re a pale imitation of the original, but not because the source material is unimpeachable. No, it’s usually because of the story’s inability to adapt to the times (“Herbie: Fully Loaded”), or because the people involved with the remake have little regard for what people liked about the original (ahem, “Land of the Lost”).
Ah, but “Ice Castles,” that’s a perfect property to remake. The love story at its center is a sweet one, and the idea of a blind figure skater doing triple axels puts all of the true underdog sports movies of the 2000s to shame. And good for them that they didn’t try to make the movie more appealing by sexing it up – indeed, this is an innocent and squeaky clean a movie as you’re likely to see this year. Unfortunately, it’s also not very good.
Alexis Winston (Taylor Firth) loves to skate, and her boyfriend Nick (Rob Mayes) dreams of playing professional hockey. Lexi enters a local competition and catches the eye of a top-notch instructor Aiden (Morgan Kelly), who encourages her to come to Boston and train with him. Lexi becomes wildly successful but hates playing the fame game, and her busy schedule kills her relationship with Nick. When a fall on the ice leaves her blind, Lexi goes home to wallow in self-pity, but Nick encourages her to keep skating and believe in herself.
The way that Lexi and Nick are torn apart does not feel at all natural. Nick encourages Lexi to train under Aiden, then gets pissy when he can’t get her on the phone because she’s training every waking minute of the day. They set up Carrie Turner, a former student of Aiden’s, to be Lexi’s foe, but then she disappears for the final 40 minutes of the movie. Nick goes to see Lexi skate, and then spots her kissing Aiden on the lips. Nick, rightly, assumes they’re dating, but this is never really expanded on. It’s an awfully odd showing of affection if they’re not dating, and if they are…ewww. He’s twice her age, not to mention dating your pupils cannot be good for your image as an instructor. Either way, it’s poorly handled.
As is the accident that leaves Lexi blind. She leaves some swank party because she finds the whole business side of skating to be a chore, and heads out to a nearby frozen lake in order to skate her pain away. Someone makes a crack before she hits her head about her being desperate for attention, and they’re spot on. This appears to be their attempt at character development, or trying to establish that she, like Nick, is flawed, but their love is pure, or something. It doesn’t work. There is also a scene of Lexi and Aiden riding a snowmobile that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything else in the movie, except that they obviously felt as though they needed a bonding scene between Lexi and Aiden and/or a non-skating action sequence. There is a reference to a piece of music Lexi skates to, but we never find out its significance. (It’s revealed in the deleted scenes.) The whole thing is quite haphazard in its assembly.
Taylor Firth, however, does work. She’s cute as a button, and not a bad actress to boot. They dress her up like an extra from “Cats” at one point, but she’s immensely likable, even when she’s not on her best behavior. Rob Mayes has those non-threatening Zac Efron looks, but he’s pretty much unbearable until the last act. Fellow skater Molly Oberstar is given very little to work with as the snotty Carrie Turner, but she fares better than Michelle Kwan, who’s only playing a TV analyst but can’t get the inflection right.
There is no reason to think a spunkier but no less sweet version of “Ice Castles” wasn’t theirs for the taking, but this version isn’t it. The movie could have used some work all around, the editing in particular. It has the right tone, but no emotion. Pity.
