Back in the late seventies/early eighties, the loveable, opportunistic movie studio known as Cannon would apparently just have a stack of scripts for creaky thrillers set aside purely for aging tough guy Charles Bronson to star in. While staring down the barrel of endless Death Wish sequels meant that he was essentially experiencing a working retirement, it meant that the dude was getting paid even if quality control was way off in rear view mirror.
If there’s anyone working in Hollywood today whose career mirrors that of “Il Brutto”, it’s undoubtedly Liam Neeson who eventually went from saving people from the holocaust in Schindler’s List to saving his daughter by annihilating a third of the population of Paris in Taken. Since then he’s made it his business to appear in as many glossy, if soulless, action thrillers as humanly possible before age finally claims him. A blustery example of this is The Ice Road – a movie that combines Neeson kicking ass with the type of vehicular peril you’d get in in a season of Ice Road Truckers. Surely dad movie heaven then, right?
An explosion in a mine of the Canadian provenance of Manitoba leaves 26 miners trapped in a cave that’s slowly filling with methane and the owning company, Katka, scrambling to mount a rescue attempt. The only way to save them is to blast, but the only way to do that is to have incredibly heavy equipment delivered within a limited time frame to clear out that explosive gas. Just in case you were worried that this disaster didn’t have enough hoops to jump through, the only passage to deliver these gargantuan pieces of equipment is over winter roads and frozen over lakes despite the weight issues meaning that the ice could crack.
Trucker Jim Goldenrod immediately leaps into action and starts recruiting drivers to embark on the dangerous delivery with him as redundancy protocols suggest three separate trucks carrying three seperate wellheads. Enter Mike McCann, a grizzled driver who recently lost his job for punching out a douchebag for mocking his PTSD suffering brother, Gurty, who needs the rather sizable fee that’s being offered. Joining Goldenrod, a young Indigenous woman named Tantoo and an actuary responsible for risk assessment, Mike and Gurty climb behind the wheel of their trucks to help save the lives of those trapped men. However, while the tight time frame and those potentially lethal roads still weren’t enough hazards for you, it soon becomes clear that someone doesn’t actually want this mission to succeed as sabotage so becomes apparent.
With cracking roads and fracturing trust abound, can Mike figure out who’s the bad guy before the ground literally disappears out from under his feet?
If the whole treacherous mercy mission plot that sees trucks traversing a lethal landscape sounds a bit familiar, it becomes fairly obvious very early on that writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh just wanted to make his own version of The Wages Of Fear, only with far less tension and a script that feels it was written by twelve year old with a sizable assist by AI in order to make a deadline. Thing is, it’s not like Hensleigh hasn’t been involved in a movie like this before thanks to a story and writing credit on the gargantuan disaster flick, Armageddon, which also saw blue collar workers slaving their way through absurdly tough working conditions – e.g. space; however, despite once penning such other, well known box office behemoths as Die Hard With A Vengence, The Rock and Jumanji, it seems that his knack for scripting tight action flicks has all but deserted him. The fact that he’s also the director too just makes things even worse as he throws out so many aging disaster movie tropes and outlandish twists, you seriously start to wonder if this movie is a spoof that just forgot to add any laughs.
In fact, if the film had decided to go down a less sensationalist route that throws literally everything but the frozen kitchen sink at its heroes, The Ice Road could have been a legitimately gripping thrill-ride, but as Hensleigh doesn’t seem to think that driving 32 tons of weight over ice less than 30 inches thick is up to the task, he overloads the flick with a cartoonish amount of threats. First there’s the ticking clock of the men trapped in the mine, but the script chooses to turn the screws even more by making the vast majority of the trapped miners disturbingly willing to murder the wounded in order to ensure that the oxygen last longer which only really succeeds in not making you care much if they get rescued at all.
Then there’s the matter of an early set back which is supposed to shock us with an early exit of one of the more recognisable members of the cast, but at the same time the movie wants us to believe that trucks driving normally can conceivably crack the ice, but rolling one of those big bastards onto its side isn’t even going to cause a dent because (and I quote) “the weight is more evenly distributed”. But still Hensleigh churns on the threat – there’s a whiff of corporate villainy; we don’t know if Amber Midthunder’s militant Native American can be trusted; and we even have a saboteur thrown into the mix which instantly removes the man vs. nature tone and handbrake turns the film into the more standard realms of a typical thriller. The problem is, the film is so anxious to keep find new ways to trip up its leads, it all ultimately cancels each other out and instead invokes disbelieving chuckles rather than gasps of horror.
And yet through it all, Liam Neeson remains ever the resolute professional. Reacting to iffy CGI; punching whomever the script demands he punch; and trying his damnedest to make some truly horrible dialogue sound even remotely natural, you’ve got to hand it to the old workhorse – even when a particular scene mid-movie has him actually recite the entire plot in a breathless panic to himself presumably to catch anyone up who can’t be arsed to put down their phone. Seemingly a far wiser man, Lawrence Fishburn dips in, takes the money and dips out with a minimum of fuss, while Midthunder does what she can to pad out her action resume until she scored the Prey gig. OK, I’ll throw my hands up and admit that The Ice Road does look particularly fun to film (Neeson looks like he’s having a ball pretending to hang off the side of trucks), but the only real enjoyment you’ll get from watching it is mostly on the unintentional side.
A potentially knuckle-gnawing premise is practically buried in a snowdrift of clumsy plotting that not even Neeson’s trademark gumption can salvage. In fact, at times The Ice Road doesn’t even feel like a real movie at all and often gas the surreal feel of the kind of fake spoof delivered by SNL or Jimmy Kimmel. Do yourself a favour and either watch The Wages Of Fear or Sorcerer again, or just nail a couple of episodes of Ice Road Truckers and call it a day…
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