“The Ice Road” Review
Liam Neeson stars in “The Ice Road” as a trucker who must race against time by driving a truck across a crumbing road to save trapped miners.
Liam Neeson is one of those actors who elevates anything he stars in with his powerful nature as a performer. While his work in “Schindler’s List,” “Taken” and “The Grey” is legendary, he makes even the most standard film just a bit better. Such is the case with the recent Netflix film, “The Ice Road” which, by itself, is a perfectly decent film with Liam Neeson being the gruff but invested hero we love.
Set in the wastelands of Canada, the film stars Neeson as Mike McCann, a trucker who accepts a job to haul essential gear across treacherous roads made of ice in order to get trapped miners out of a cave. But doing so is easier said than done as Neeson and his crew must move against the clock while being surrounded by an unforgiving landscape.
The best thing about the film are the actors who take a decent script and give it their all. Neeson is a cool lead and brings a level of integrity to the role of an average man who must go up against nature. Mike also has a real interesting motivation for taking such a hazardous job and that concerns getting enough money to get his own truck and supporting his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and communication problems.
Together, Mike and Gurty join the crew organized by Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) and composed of fellow trucker Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) and Varnay (Benjamin Walker) who has been assigned by the mining company to oversee the job. With the exception of Mike and Gurty, most of the characters of “The Ice Road” just have no real interesting character traits. If one of these characters were to die, there’s not enough emotional connection to feel much sadness.
Everything about the film is perfectly serviceable but there’s simply nothing that memorable about the film other than Neeson and the premise of moving on dangerous roads which isn’t taken advantage of. In another Neeson thriller, “The Grey,” the environment is insanely cruel and you feel isolated from the world. In “The Ice Road,” there’s an impression of isolation but not enough to convince you that if these characters get into trouble, they’re on their own.
Parts of the film feel outright lazy, especially the bad guys who are easy to spot despite being “surprise villains.” Without spoiling anything, if you’ve seen “Aliens” then you know who the bad guys of the film are. A film like “The Ice Road” doesn’t even need a villain other than the environment that Mike and the crew must navigate, especially when going too fast or too slow on the road will cause the whole thing to collapse. The tension that ought to be present in a film of this caliber just doesn’t come through in the final product.
While most people who watch this film will find some entertainment value, there’s nothing that spectacular to warrant a second viewing. “The Ice Road” is just a standard action thriller with one hell of a leading actor carrying the weight but it’s not a bad film to kill two hours watching.
