Three men on the trail of a fox in the snow come upon a crashed plane with a dead pilot and a duffel of $4.4 million in cash: "It's the American Dream in a gym bag." The cracks-in-the-ice sequence of events is involving enough on the what-happens-next level. And it attains something approximating eternal verity (sometimes called common knowledge) in the spectacle of ordinary people madly revising their moral positions under the gravitational pull of a large mass of money. And the characterization by Billy Bob Thornton of a rustic chucklehead — duct-taped glasses frames, yellowed teeth, plastered hair — is uncommonly, perhaps unprecedentedly, detailed, shaded, multidimensional, not just one dumb thing after another. Other than that, the movie is nothing much to shout about, and any raised voices you might have heard are a measure of the increasing rarity and unfamiliarity of lifesized crime films. Comparisons with Fargo, though they can only hurt, are difficult to avoid. The Midwest. Snow. Funny hats. A pregnant heroine, if she can be called one. (Bridget Fonda, shot in startlingly softer focus than everyone else in the picture.) An escalating body count. And was Billy Bob Thornton paying conscious homage with his rapid repetition of the word "deal" in his first few seconds on screen? Besides all of which, director Sam Raimi is a friend and sometime collaborator of the Coens, though nowhere in his personal collection of live-action comic books (The Evil Dead, Darkman, The Quick and the Dead, etc.) had there been a hint of the new-found ambition on exhibit here. Nor, it would appear, had there been adequate practice for the "powerful" climax. It pleads rather than compels. Bill Paxton, Brent Briscoe. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd