The Ice Road product reviews

Liam Neeson is really doing everything in his power to maintain his legacy as an action hero, after his success with Taken back in 2008. In the last couple of years, we've seen him in The Marksman, Honest Thief, Cold Pursuit, The Commuter, and now The Ice Road. What sort of murderous situation has his wholesome character been unwittingly been drawn into this time?

To be perfectly honest, the first act of this film is a stroke of genius. At least as far as New Zealand goes, we love Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, John Wick, CSI), we love Liam Neeson (Taken, The Grey, Schindler's List), we love The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers, and the premise really hits home as New Zealand was rocked by the Pike River Mine tragedy that took the lives of 29 miners in 2010 (their bodies still have not been recovered) and led to legislation improvements that resulted in a new Health & Safety at Work Act. The sequence of events that occurs is something that every single person in the construction industry has been taught about, and it resonates with us as a country.

Combining three things that we love with a premise that mirrors the national tragedy that led to the largest overhaul of health and safety legislation in 25 years? Brilliant decisions. Does The Ice Road end up scoring a hyperbolic 110%? Unfortunately, by the time it crosses the finish line, it's long ago run out of fuel and leaves the audience feeling...meh.

It's an incredibly disappointing turn of events. A highly relatable sequence of events, with some very well-known and likeable names in the cast list, and yet, some poor writing choices result in a near-perfect first act going to waste. Fishburne and Neeson do a commendable job, turning one-dimensional characters into something worth investing in. They turn "brother of mentally impaired man" and "truck driver" into well-rounded characters that have priorities, ideals, and both ethical and moral standards. All of this is done in a few scenes, with minimal dialogue setup; all through some reasonable direction from Jonathan Hensleigh, but mostly from the pedigree of the actors.

At some point, however, Hensleigh was not content with his story. Not content that he could pull off a Togo and have a film that centers entirely on the idea of traversing this inhospitable and questionably safe ice road, for 30 hours straight, out-of-season, and while carrying 700,000 pounds of cargo, when the act of stopping, moving too fast, or too slow, can sink you to the bottom of the water in seconds. Hensleigh was unable to bring tension to this premise without the introduction of actual physical villains. In a decision that reeks of letting a 9-year-old come up with the story, The Ice Road takes a drastic turn in the second act; one that it never fully recovers from. The creation of a physical secondary villain element completely sweeps the titular threat under the rug. Everything that the film was building up until that point is essentially disregarded for some caricatures so poorly developed that you can see them twirling their metaphorical moustache in every scene they are in.

The film attempts to balance two sides of the equation at once--the truckers traversing the thinning ice road, and the miners attempting to stay alive--and for what it's worth, the miners' perspectives are not ignored. The story delves into not just the immediate causes of the tragedy, but also the underlying systemic problems that meant the inciting incident was not only likely but guaranteed to happen at some point. It is the other aspect of the natural tension that is undercut by Hensleigh's script, which keeps pushing for more and more "Hollywood" action. The tension between prioritizing production over safety is a balancing act that every high-risk business undergoes on a daily basis. Balancing financial costs, severity, likelihood, available technology, etc., but the script wants none of it. Hensleigh's The Ice Road wants action; car chases, snowmobile, and motorbike fights, shootouts, hand-to-hand combat. It's all in there, it's all unnecessary, and it's all poorly paced.

It all culminates into one of the most anticlimactic fight scenes I've ever witnessed.

It's not all bad though. The first act is top-notch. I didn't care about any trite platitudes that reek of a first-draft script because Fishburne and Neeson lifted it out of the gutter and gave it heart. The musical compositions were grand and epic with a strong orchestral focus; worthy of a cross-country adventure-thriller. The cinematography was right where it needed to be; lots of panning wide shots with gorgeous landscapes, and closeups for the tense action scenes (despite my seemingly strong hatred of the use of action written into this film, there is an exceptional scene with some drifting trucks that looked and felt amazing to watch).

There was an opportunity for a tense dramatic thriller in The Ice Road, but the opportunity was squandered to make way for a more mainstream and accessible action flick. It ends up being above average, but that's a discouraging endpoint for a film that starts off so well.