Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh
Starring Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder and Benjamin Walker

If the pairing of the action/thriller genre and Liam Neeson in a central role still arouses initial excitement, The Ice Road will be the film that places a permanent freeze on those sentiments. In fact, taking a closer look back over Liam Neeson’s recent body of work in this genre only made me question what there was to look forward to in the first place.

A gas explosion at a diamond mine located in Manitoba, Canada has caused its collapse and trapped several miners inside. In order to rescue them, some heavy machinery needs to be transported from Winnipeg in trucks that must drive over a frozen lake and hazardous winter roads in horrendous conditions. The operation is so unlikely to succeed at the first attempt, three trucks carrying the same piece of equipment are sent together in hope of one making the journey all the way. The man hiring, Jim (Laurence Fishburne) is one of the drivers and he employs Mike (Liam Neeson) to operate one of the other trucks. Mike is full-time carer of his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), who is suffering from PTSD and must accompany them on the ice roads. The driver of the final truck is Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), a local girl in a perpetually pissed-off mood who has Tom (Benjamin Walker), an actuary performing a risk assessment for the company that owns the mine, in the passenger seat.

‘This mission is on thin ice’

Perhaps The Ice Road’s tagline on IMDB is in fact a warning, for it certainly applies to the film itself. This action/thriller is among the most downright boring, laughably ludicrous and shoddily executed of its kind I can ever recall viewing. Aside from the characters being completely uninteresting and the dialogue terribly disengaging (and just terrible!), the visual effects are by far the worst I’ve seen in a cinematic release in many years. I cannot even come close to passing this off as mindless popcorn entertainment and cannot deny it is quite a challenge to offer more constructive criticism to this film, as you may have fathomed. However, there is one point that comes to mind worth mentioning. Very little time is invested into the perspectives of the trapped miners. They are without a doubt in a race against time for their survival, which depends entirely upon an impossibly difficult rescue mission outside of their control. Surely, this prospect alone could easily have been used to make us care about a character or two and to raise the immediacy of the rescue operation. Instead, the plot is as overloaded as the trucks themselves with both natural and man-made hazards all coming undone on very thin ice.

Put plain and simple, The Ice Road is more like a bad B-movie adaptation of reality TV series Ice Road Truckers, where I can only assume many of the poorly conceived and illustrated ideas in this film were derived from.

The Ice Road is showing in cinemas across Australia from August 12.

Moviedoc thanks Rialto Distribution and Ned & Co for the screener link to watch and review this film.

Review by Leigh for Moviedoc

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