The Ice Road: Wintery Actioner Pits Man Against Manitoba… With Predictable Results
By Kim Hughes
Rating: C
Impossible odds and a furious deadline have propelled many great and not-so-great action films. Those factors are very much at play in The Ice Road, which stars Liam Neeson, several big rigs, and the province of Manitoba in a thriller that, though by-the-numbers in execution, boasts a watchable enough premise.
In northern Manitoba, miners are drilling for diamonds. A methane explosion kills eight and traps another 26 with grave injuries and limited oxygen. Rescue is imperilled both by nefarious unforeseen forces that will be revealed later and by the fact that it’s April and the province’s ice road truckers — those hale souls who transport cargo across seasonally frozen waterways — have dispersed until the following winter.
Why? Because ice roads in April are dangerously unstable. But the only way to save the miners is to transport a wellhead to drain the methane so those trapped can be safely drilled out. The Canadian government springs into action (!?) and soon, trucking company owner Laurence Fishburne is tapped to assemble a crack crew of drivers.
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Enter Indigenous spitfire and trucker Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) who is sprung from prison; her brother is among the trapped miners. Another driver, Mike, played by Neeson, has rather fortuitously just lost his trucker job in North Dakota after pummeling a bully picking on his non-verbal brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), an Iraq veteran with aphasia who happens to be a savant mechanic.
Those four, plus an insurance company overseer, pile into the rigs and head north. And of course, calamities of various sorts and credulities ensue.
Trucks fall through broken ice, people drown, ne’er-do-wells with hidden agendas are discovered while the good guys bond and push towards completing the mission.
There’s some cool real-world stuff here about negotiating ice in massive vehicles that should captivate anyone unfamiliar with the reality TV show Ice Road Truckers which covered a lot of this same ground. The cast is also committed and likeable.
Are there crater-sized logic gaps and plot holes? Yup. But anyone settling into The Ice Road expecting anything other than blustery, nail-biting thrills has streamed the wrong movie.
The Ice Road. Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh. Starring Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder and Marcus Thomas. Available on VOD June 25.