Film Review: The Ice Road
Stills courtesy of Rialto Distribution.
Set in the icy tundra of Manitoba Canada, The Ice Road is a race-against-time action thriller that pits Liam Neeson not only against thin ice roads that could crack at any minute, but also corporate greed.
After a methane explosion in a diamond mine underground leaves 24 trapped and several dead with only 36 hours of oxygen to survive, a rescue team are hastily assembled to haul heavy cargo across ice roads during warmer weather where the ice is much thinner and fragile than usual.
In charge of this brigade is the respectable Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), who offers a total of $200,000 to be split equally among the drivers if they make it. Comprising this rag-tag group is a gruff and terse Mark (Liam Neeson) and his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas). They both desperately search for new work after being fired on account of Mark punching a co-worker for taunting his brother’s PTSD-related aphasia (an inability to communicate). The kamikaze mission is also joined by the recently released from prison Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), as well as insurance assessor Tom Varnay (Benjamin Walker) who both hide secrets capable of spiralling the mission off its course.
Taking its cinematic cues from French film The Wages of Fear, or perhaps its American remake Sorcerer that both include the storyline of drivers transporting explosive nitro-glycerine across bumpy terrain, The Ice Road fails to generate anywhere near the edge-of-your-seat tension its predecessors did.
On the one hand, the cinematography impressively frames the ice roads with an endless horizon that creates a sense of being trapped in an abyss. For example, when Mark plunges into the freezing water potentially sacrificing himself to save his brother, the camera holds back in a wide shot for several seconds, allowing the viewer to lean in to hear or see if they are alive. Even though it is unlikely in any movie that Liam Neeson’s character would unceremoniously die half-way through, it still imbues trepidation in what is really the only effective moment of the film.
Otherwise, the film feels markedly repetitive and dull, switching back and forth between the trapped miners and the drivers with barely any progression in their dialogue. The script too is problematic: the opening scene where Gurty is bullied for his condition seems extracted from the kind of conversations that might happen in a school playground. Even throughout the film, Gurty is mostly abused and harangued by other characters for his impediments rather than treated humanely.
The Ice Road showcases a gruff and grumbly Neeson taking the reins of a poor script with few narrative twists. Although a talented cast cobble together a semblance of intrigue, much better examples of the sub-genre exist elsewhere.
The Ice Road is showing in cinemas from Thursday 12th August 2021.