The Ice Road

"It's going to crack for maybe two, three thousand metres!!"

"That's over a mile!!"

The latest Liam Neeson thriller is laced with dialogue that will make your eyeballs spin in their sockets. It hits levels of stupidity not seen since the 8th of March 1987, the day The A- Team finished and it contains the worst CGI since Air Force One went down in......well in Air Force One.

But I kinda liked it. 

Mike McCann (Liam Neeson) has just been fired for being a good brother and it's fortuitous timing because his skills are needed elsewhere. A mine has just collapsed in the Canadian province of Manitoba and the men trapped are running out of oxygen. Wellheads to drain gas are needed to allow safe blasting and these wellheads have to be transported from over the American border across ice roads over lakes that have been closed due to rising Spring temperatures. It's deadly dangerous work and only those truckers with iron constitutions are willing to take it on. Mike is one such driver and his brother/mechanic Gurty (Marcus Thomas) is along for the trip. In the trucks behind him are fellow drivers Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) and company man Tom Varnay (Benjamin Walker). Will they make it before the icy depths can claim them?

Capitalism is BAD. The US government's treatment of veterans is BAD. Over medication is BAD. Racism is BAD. These are things we know to be true but it's not a bad thing to see them bluntly shouted at us every now and then. The Ice Road belts us in the face with them in the quieter moments between it's scenes of Mike and co struggling to control big rigs sliding across a white landscape. In one scene Mike is guilty of that very racism and it's a moment that will remind you of Neeson's own controversial admissions from 2019. Admissions more than likely to blame for the downward trajectory of his career lately. Whether he can drag himself back out of DTV land remains to be seen but as always he's the best thing in the movies he makes. The cranky but decent screen persona he's built since 2008's Taken is present and correct and helps The Ice Road through some of it's more idiotic turns, and there's a lot of those. 

Films about people in big lorries driving through dangerous territories have been done many times before with The Wages Of Fear and Sorcerer being the standouts. Two films that would leave you clammy from stress just watching these skilled drivers doing their jobs while the terrain around them turns malevolent. In 2021 a simple story line like that just won't do so here we get gunplay, corporate dodginess, bad guys on snowmobiles riding right out of a Bond film, full on lorry cab scraps, man made avalanches and even a Chekov's rat. It's all silly and unnecessary window dressing in a story that needs none of it. It gets so full on that the blunt treatment of themes mentioned earlier eventually feels almost subtle and thoughtful.

Still, there's some of us out here who still get a kick watching the old skool heroes getting the job done. Neeson's hit the stage where he doesn't even bother trying an American accent anymore ("You can kiss my Irish ass" will raise a titter) and Laurence Fishburne is always a welcome sight, even if he is very underused here. Amber Midthunder who's been quietly doing good work on tv and film for the last decade makes an impression too as a First Nation tribe member who's had it up to *here* with the bullshit she faces as an indigenous woman in a male world. If anything comes from this film hopefully it will be her career on the up and up. 

The Ice Road is available to stream on Amazon now. It's silly fluff but it might entertain you for a couple of hours. You won't remember much when it's over though.