Joel Kinnaman's 96-Minute Action Thriller Is Officially Prime Video's Biggest Streaming Hit

There are loads of great movies out in the wide world of streaming just waiting for viewers to discover them, but sometimes ... sometimes you just want to kick back, crack a beer and watch a meat-and-potatoes action movie. You can always throw on an old favorite like "Die Hard," "The Great Escape," or "Speed," but it's good to try something new once in a while. It seems Prime Video subscribers are doing just that right now, because director Stefan Ruzowitzky's under-the-radar programmer "Icefall" is currently the most popular film on the service (per FlixPatrol). And as you can see from its trailer, it's basically "Cliffhanger" without the mountains (which was itself essentially "Die Hard" in the mountains).

"Icefall" stars Joel Kinnaman as Harlan, a brooding veteran who's doing the survivalist thing in an icy wilderness. While traversing a frozen lake, he discovers a bag stuffed with $20 million in cold, hard cash. The bag has floated up from a crashed airplane, and the folks who have an illicit claim to it intend to retrieve it. This sets off a series of set pieces involving winter-ready vehicles tearing up and down the icy expanse, which gets awfully dicey when that frozen surface starts to crack.

Kinnaman's character teams up with an Indigenous American game warden (Cara Jade Myers) and a local elder (the great Graham Greene in one of his final roles). They're up against a group of criminals led by the reliable Danny Huston. Again, this is familiar stuff, but is it worth your 96 minutes?

Despite Stefan Ruzowitzky's impressive pedigree (he won the Best International Feature Film Oscar for "The Counterfeiters" back when it was still known as the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar), "Icefall" was unceremoniously shuffled off to VOD-land in 2025. Hence, there aren't a lot of reviews out there. Of the four write-ups at Rotten Tomatoes, only one is positive, and it's a two-and-a-half-star review from Steven Prokopy for Third Coast Review. He seemed to think the action was mostly up to snuff, did Josh Bell (reviewing the movie for Crooked Marquee), but the latter noted the visual effects leave much to be desired.

So, your mileage might vary? Joel Kinnaman's a solid action lead (the "RoboCop" remake was not his fault), and it'd be nice to see Graham Greene in one last movie. You could view "Icefall" as a warm-up movie for Jaume Collet-Serra's forthcoming "Cliffhanger" reboot (which was supposed to come out this year, but it's currently in release schedule limbo despite having a sequel in development). And, hey, what better way to tough out the dog days of summer than watching a wintry action flick?