On paper, Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road would seem to be a promising fusion of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Michael Bay’s Armageddon, the TV show Ice Road Truckers, and virtually any entry in Liam Neeson’s mid-life action-thriller cycle. But in reality, this genre mixtape samples incompatible sources.
The Wages of Fear offers an obsessive, grimy metaphor for proletariat purgatory, which doesn’t serve the audience’s expectation that Neeson will embody the ultimate tormented and sensitive he-man. In turn, Neeson’s dourness, intensified here by his underwritten stock role, nullifies The Ice Road’s potential to reach the heights of the shameless cartoon absurdity of Armageddon, which Hensleigh co-wrote. Even the titular ice is often a disappointment, as much of it was clearly born in post-production. What we’re left with, then, is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.
The film’s first act is especially dire, given the thickets of jargon, dime-store character motivations, and unexpected turns that perversely strand the most charismatic actors on the sidelines. Neeson steps into the familiar role of Mike, a sad, dignified badass who drives big rigs across dangerous terrain. He’s unemployable though, due to his devotion to his brother, Gurty (Marcus Thomas), an Iraq War vet who suffers from aphasia. Like many characters with mental problems in bad movies, Gurty is also a savant, a talented mechanic who nevertheless rubs truckers the wrong way with his awkwardness. This discount Of Mice and Men routine is borderline tasteless, as Hensleigh only has a nominal interest in exploring the brothers’ relationship. Gurty exists only to make Neeson look more noble, which is unnecessary given the actor’s stature, while providing Mike with a reason to get back on the ice.
A remote mine in the northern regions of Canada has collapsed due to murkily defined reasons, trapping dozens of miners underground. A rescue mission to deliver drilling equipment to the site must be mounted in 30 hours before the miners run out of oxygen, and Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) recruits Mike and Gurty, as well as a fierce young trucker named Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), to drive his trucks with him across a vast frozen ocean that’s on the verge of beginning its seasonal thaw. In tow is an obviously corrupt company man, Varnay (Benjamin Walker), who taunts Tantoo with racial epithets and threatens to break the crew apart as the ice cracks beneath the weight of the enormous trucks.
Hensleigh springs a few startling images throughout the film, such as a shot of one of the trucks from below the ice, suggesting the cold bottomless hell awaiting the truckers, and one of the early calamities is staged with crackerjack timing. Too often, though, The Ice Road is stuck in an expository holding pattern, and the actors never form any sort of rapport. Fishburne is the only actor who seems to recognize the material for the shlock that it is, in turn having fun with his phallically named character while resting on his own big, badass laurels, but he isn’t around for long. Just as irritating is the casting of Holt McCallany, another huge presence, as merely someone who’s waiting to be rescued. He looks as if he was born to be a trucker, and McCallany might’ve shaken Neeson out of his stoic stasis if they’d been given any scenes together. Midthunder, Walker, and Thomas aren’t up to such a task.
Neeson isn’t exactly bad in The Ice Road, but he’s unengaged and unsurprising. Most of the actor’s thrillers, no matter how derivative, offer some sort of curveball, often tapping viscerally into his gift for playing men haunted by submerged rage. In The Ice Road, though, Neeson is dwarfed by noisy pyrotechnics and plot gimmickry, and so he becomes a supporting character in his own action vehicle. Mike has no true inner dimensions, because he’s just being played by a great actor in depressing autopilot mode. Near the end of the film, Hensleigh seems to sense this hollowness, outfitting Mike with a new character motivation in an attempt to position him as the next great Neeson avenger, but it’s too little too late, not to mention desperate.
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