So, I feel like I have to ask. Who actually benefits from these endless action excursions that Liam Neeson keeps insisting on undertaking? Obviously Neeson himself is cashing the checks as he continues on his cinematic equivalent of dodging retirement in order to keep busy; but I can’t imagine these things end up being a glowing feather in the cap of whatever studio has made it. Take 2021’s The Ice Road for example, an utterly forgettable reworking of Wages Of Fear that saw Neeson’s virtuous truck driver negotiate lethal, Canadian driving conditions and gun totting assassins in order to deliver vital machinery to rescue some trapped miners; well somehow, it’s got a sequel that I’m pretty sure no one – possibly not even Neeson himself – was asking for.
So it’s off to Nepal we go on another action adventure that isn’t that adventurous, and isn’t particularly action-packed either as the Ice Road franchise takes us to a place where there isn’t even that much ice on the roads…
Mike McCann is still dealing with the courageous sacrifice made by his late brother Gerty as he struggles with survivor’s guilt that’s affecting his training to grant his sibling’s final wish – for his ashes to be scattered at the summit of Mount Everest. While we take a moment to wonder what kind of thoughtless piece of shit makes their last wish force a hapless relative to travel to one of the most dangerous, inhospitable places on earth to pour out their corpse dust, good old dependable Mike heads to Nepal in order to get this thing done. Once there, he meets up with local Everest guide, Dhani Yangchen, and they join other tourists aboard the “Kiwi Express” tour bus as the head off to base camp.
Meanwhile, over in Kodari, scruples-free Rudra Yash who works for a a corrupt industrial company is trying to get a massive hydroelectric dam built but is finding that he’s being blocked by the family of local holdout, Ganesh Rai. But after killing Ganesh’s father in an “accidental” bus crash, Ruda figures if he can ice Ganesh too, then his son, Vijay, should be a pushover to sell. However, when his goons make a move to kidnap Vijay to discover where his father is hiding, guess which bus they all end up on – gold star to you if you said the Kiwi Express. Despite being a truck driver with no real military training on holiday with the urn of his brother, Mike naturally engages these highly trained killers in the fight to the death and in the aftermath, soon discovers that the local police are sitting snuggly in Ruda’s back pocket.
Teaming with Dhani, Vijay, an American professor and his daughter and the grizzled, Kiwi bus driver, Mike steers the bus into the highly hazardous roads and painfully narrow mountain passes to stay as far ahead of their pursuers as they possibly can. But even if they get to Ganesh first, can they keep the Rai boys alive long enough to thwart those nefarious corporate plans?
Maybe I’d be less hard on Ice Road: Vengeance, if it had been directed by some fresh talent with only a few, award winning shorts under their belt, because as least then you could understand the law of diminishing returns looming large in the rearview mirror. However, once again, we find Jonathan Hensleigh sat in the director’s chair who somehow manages to not only deliver a movie called Ice Road: Vengence that doesn’t actually contain many icy roads, but also boasts a surprising lack of vengence too. Still, if nothing else, at least Hensleigh and Neeson managed to score a holiday to Nepal for their troubles, that is unless most of it was rendered via green screen.
The main problem is that Hensleigh has delivered an action thriller that somehow has no momentum whatsoever despite the lion’s share of it taking the form of an extended chase in the director of the Chinese border. Some aspects of the original has made it over in the form of stuffing Neeson behind the wheel of some sort of heavy goods vehicle (this time a bus) and have him stumble into the dastardly masterplan of yet another evil corporation, but while the first film firmly cast Mike as an unlikely hero thrown into a spiraling action conspiracy, here he’s now creeping into latter John McClane territory as he smites his enemies with the power of his plot armour. Look, I love Neeson, OK? But the movie isn’t even trying to disguise that it’s been written on autopilot as the 73 year old out-fights military trained mercs who are less than half his age and is suddenly a crack shot with a machine gun. Furthermore, due to his late brother’s utterly unreasonable request (fuck you, Gerty), we’re reintroduced to Mike as he’s taken up mountain climbing without a safety line and dodging computer generated rock falls.
Still, Neeson is as Neeson does, and while this year’s The Naked Gun was ironically a far less ludicrous action outing despite being an out and out spoof, it looks like the grizzled Irish sod is still having the time of his life.
He’s certainly having more fun than the rest of the cast who, despite putting the work in, remain just as forgettable as the side-characters from the first film. Fan Bingbing actually isn’t bad at all as the rough, tough, female lead, but everyone else – to the random, surly teen character to the flavourless villains – go through the motions as the plot gets steadily more ludicrous. It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of the visual effects look like they’ve sprung from the harddrive of a computer discovered in a landfill from 20 years ago, but every time Hensleigh’s script finds yet another massively outlandish obstacle for Neeson and Co. to overcome, you can almost hear an underpaid visual effects artist burst into tears.
If you thought that the moments from the first film where Neeson and his buddies suddenly A-Teamed their ways out of sticky situation was outlandish, wait until you get a load of our heroes having to abseil down to cannibalise wrecked vehicles at the bottom of a ravine in order to fit a whole new axle onto a fucked Kiwi Express in only a few hours. You won’t believe how easy Neeson and his (mostly untrained) gang is able to perform massive overhauls of ruined vehicles with basic equipment, but then you probably won’t believe much else that occurs throughout the flick as well.
While I’m still finding it hard to fault Neeson himself for continuing appearing in such risable garbage, I do have to wonder just how long he’s actually going to be able to keep doing movies like this. I mean, it’s good to stay busy in your later years and you have to admire the shape he’s in and the fact that he still has that commanding presence, but at the same time he’s actively adding to the growing pile of direct to streaming crap thats in danger of growing so big, it may soon blot out the sun and cause a second ice age.
Still, at least it’ll mean that roads will actually have ice on them then….
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