Rated: M
Directed and Written by: Jonathan Hensleigh
Director of Photography: Tom Stern
Produced by: Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt, Eugene Musso, Shivani Rawat, Lee Nelson, David Tish
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laurence J. Fishburne III, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder, Benjamin Walker, Matt McCoy, Holt McCallany, Martin Sensmeier, Matt Salinger.
Hauling heavy loads over ice is what truckers call an ice road, meaning, a suicide mission.
So much can go wrong.
And does in this action drama with Liam Neeson behind the wheel as Mike: a trucker with a one punch knockout.
He’s a trucker always getting fired looking out for his veteran brother, Gurty (Marcus Thomas) suffering from aphasia: ‘I am the only one who can understand what he is saying, and he’s a brilliant mechanic, but he does not like taking orders,’ says Neeson about his character.
After a methane pocket causes an explosion at a diamond mine, miners are trapped with a thirty-hour window until their oxygen runs out. The only way to get drilling wellheads to free the men is to haul by truck, over an ice-road closed for the season.
Goldenrod (Laurence J. Fishburne III) is called in to get the job done.
The only way Goldenrod can see a truck making it through to the miners is by sending three trucks, in the hope one will make it through to the miners.
It’s a strategy of tactical redundancy.
Fired from yet another job, the Irish, tooth-pick in mouth trucker, Mike decides the risk is worth the reward – enough cash to put towards his own rig. He takes one truck.
In the second is Goldenrod himself.
In the third is Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), just bailed from jail after protesting against all of North America for taking her ancestors land.
Each take a rig with two-hundred thousand on the table to share, or to go to whoever makes it to the other side, along with Insurance man, Varnay (Benjamin Walker) there to protect his company’s investment. And Gurty’s pet rat.
The fuse is lit.
And there literally is a fuse burning to ignite dynamite at one point. It’s that kind of movie.
With winches and d bolts and petrol in diesel tanks as sabotage. The action’s relentless. And by the end overdone with choppy editing to cut down the problem solving montages to speed up the action, along with splicing to another scene that worked most of the time but by the end left gaping holes. Like, how did the rig go from full speed to idling in a second?
And why isn’t that guy with the broken leg screaming his head off?
But this ‘bull run’ about ice-truckers who can stop for nothing and no-one has the constant underlying suspense of the trucks always on the verge of cracking through the ice and sinking.
As Tantoo coolly explains to Varnay the insurance guy:
Movement causes waves so if you drive too fast, there’s too much movement. The ice cracks. In you go.
Too slow, the ice breaks under the weight of the rig. In you go.
I actually yelled a few times.
The whole idea of ice-truckers is exciting to watch.
Writer and director Jonathan Hensleigh didn’t want to shoot a VFX film: “I wanted real background – the ice road, the mountain driving sequences, I wanted it all to look real.”
And seeing the rigs driven across the ice is the best part of the film.
Pairing back the action and filling the gaps so the editing wasn’t so choppy would have built on that suspense of driving those 18-wheeler rigs across ice. With one problem after another needing to be solved, it was all a bit unbelievable by the end.
But as action movies go, Neeson always managers to pull it off. And the storyline had enough going for it with a few twists and well-placed punches from, ‘kiss my Irish arse,’ Mike that made, The Ice Road, worth a watch.