The Ice Road, 2021.
Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh.
Starring Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder, Matt McCoy, and Benjamin Walker.
SYNOPSIS:
After an explosion in a mine traps some of the workers, a crew of truck drivers must brave the elements to deliver the rescue equipment.
There is going to come a time at some point in the future when Liam Neeson will have gone through every career choice as an angry character seeking revenge and will probably get launched into space to take on Jason Voorhees with his special set of skills. Until that magical moment comes, The Ice Road continues to see the 69-year-old Neeson taking on the baddies as he tries to do an honest day’s work by taking on one of the most challenging terrains known to man.
Now, while the prospect of an aging action hero fending off villains and taking on the elements whilst driving across the frozen lakes of northern Canada in a 35-ton truck sounds like a tempting prospect on paper, the reality is not quite the all-round polished production one would expect, mainly thanks to a throw-it-at-a-wall-and-see-what-sticks script and some painfully bad CGI that puts some of the visuals in the realm of SyFy, rather than the streaming platforms where the movie debuted last year. But are those things enough to hinder your enjoyment of The Ice Road? Don’t count on it.
Neeson plays Mike McCann, a truck driver who unfortunately keeps getting fired from his employment because when you hire him you also get his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), a gifted mechanic but also an Iraq war veteran who suffers from aphasia and PTSD, which inevitably causes problems with less-than-sympathetic colleagues whom Mike has to punch in the face every once in a while. So after getting fired for sticking up for his brother Mike answers a call from Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), who has to put together a crew to take several tons of piping and assorted equipment to a remote diamond mine in Canada after an underground explosion kills several miners and traps the rest. With only 30 hours of oxygen left before the miners all perish, Mike and Gurty, Jim, hot-headed activist driver Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) and insurance assessor Tom Varnay (Benjamin Walker) – who is along just for the ride so we know absolutely nothing is going to go wrong – take off across the ice with the rescue equipment. Will it be a smooth ride? Of course not, otherwise what would be the point of the movie?
Right then, let’s get this out of the way now – The Ice Road is not a great movie if you’re looking for Die Hard on Ice (or -in a Truck, whichever you prefer), because despite that dubious comparison which you are likely to see everywhere else, it simply does not have the production values, the pacing, the budget (or the distribution of the budget) or the general quality of that movie, or – if we’re being honest – any of the top-end knock-offs of that movie, for example Cliffhanger, Under Siege or The Rock. However, that doesn’t stop everybody involved from trying, and although the first big special effect we see is a huge CGI explosion straight from an early 2000s video game that signals the impending danger, after which we get our setup, some clunky melodrama and introductions to our main characters that offer up no surprises whatsoever, once Neeson, Fishburne and the gang get out on the ice the movie becomes quite enjoyable as every thing that could possibly go wrong does. Again, there are no surprises here but the actors are so committed to what they are doing that once all the plot details becomes clear there are some genuinely engaging moments that make the movie very watchable indeed.
Neeson doesn’t go out of his way to do anything he hasn’t done in every movie he has been in since Taken – and why should he, seeing as that has become his bread-and-butter for the past decade or so and what we pay our money to see – but Mike’s relationship with Gurty adds a little more empathy to his character, even if the dialogue doesn’t always bring it out. For his part, Marcus Thomas doesn’t have much to say throughout but his facial expressions and reactions to Mike’s tough love approach make Gurty the warmest of all the characters.
As well as throwing in disaster after disaster, the script also attempts to address a few issues that it really needn’t have bothered with, such as the racism angle thrown at Tantoo, which does play a part in the overall plot as someone needs to be convinced that she may not be trustworthy due to her ethnicity, but it is clumsily written and chucked in as an afterthought, as is the workers-versus-management angle that crops up nearer the end of the movie. It feels shoehorned in as an issue that the filmmakers felt they could address but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know and adds nothing but filler material.
But, after all that, The Ice Road does offer up enough entertainment to keep things moving, much like the trucks. Whilst the shortcomings in the production would probably damage other movies of a similar ilk, most of it doesn’t actually matter as you’re going into the movie expecting to see Liam Neeson fending off the baddies on the ice and in a truck, and that is pretty much what you get. Anything else is just unnecessary padding, and as long as you can ignore the shoddy effects and don’t go expecting a Mission: Impossible-style weave of complex plot and character study then The Ice Road will deliver exactly what you expect it to, which is more than could be said for some of the characters in the movie, but thanks to the obvious script you’ll probably have figured that out way before any of them do.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
