Netflix’s The Ice Road may star Liam Neeson, but his presence pails in comparison to the superior work he’s done in past action thrillers.

As Liam Neeson has gone further into his unlikely late-career turn as an action hero, he’s always remained committed to the roles he plays.

 

In contrast to someone like Bruce Willis, who sleepwalks his way through what seems like 10 low-budget straight-to-VOD thrillers every year, Neeson usually makes full use of his acting talents in B-level action movies.

However, Netflix’s The Ice Road may be the film that finally broke him. Overall, Neeson puts minimal energy into his performance as a long-haul trucker caught in a conspiracy.

In The Ice Road, Neeson plays Mike McCann, whose sole personality trait is that he’s loyal to his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), a truck mechanic and military veteran who suffers from aphasia after being injured in Iraq. Mike’s defending Gurty from bullying by other truckers gets both brothers fired.

 

Luckily, they almost immediately come across an opportunity that sounds too good to be true. They get a call to travel from their home in North Dakota across the border to Manitoba, Canada, where a mining company is recruiting drivers for a dangerous emergency haul over unstable ice roads, paying $50,000 per driver.

 

The Ice Road comes off a bit like the Netflix algorithm spit out a mandate to combine popular reality show Ice Road Truckers with Liam Neeson action movies, and writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh never finds a way to make that combination work.

It doesn’t help that the special effects are so atrocious that the actors often look like they aren’t anywhere near the treacherous conditions the characters are supposed to be facing.

 

It’s tough to feel the immediacy of the danger when the poorly rendered CGI snow and ice is so distracting.

Mike and Gurty face those dangers because the remote Katka Diamond Mine has suffered a collapse, trapping 26 miners with limited oxygen reserves. If the necessary equipment to clear the mine doesn’t arrive in time, the miners will die. The only way to get the equipment there is in big rigs driving across frozen lakes that are no longer all that frozen, since it’s already mid-April.

 

A trucking veteran named Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) puts out the call for drivers, and he ends up with Mike and Gurty, along with the sullen Tantoo (Legion‘s Amber Midthunder), an indigenous activist who has to be bailed out of jail to take the job. They’re joined by smarmy mining company representative Varnay (Benjamin Walker).

 

The Ice Road periodically shifts focus to what feels like an entirely different movie, as the trapped miners grow increasingly desperate.

Holt McCallany is wasted as an upstanding supervisor who’s determined to figure out why proper safety precautions that could have prevented the accident were ignored.

Things are only slightly more exciting on the ice road itself, as the drivers face perilous conditions and more human obstacles as well. Hensleigh, a veteran blockbuster screenwriter and occasional director (he helmed the 2004 version of The Punisher), stages awkward action sequences that are often hard to follow.

 

There are only so many variations on the trucks and/or characters being in danger of falling through the ice that The Ice Road can come up with to generate suspense.

 

In a big set-piece early in the movie, the drivers need to outrun cracking ice, and then Hensleigh essentially repeats himself during the third act when they have to outrun an avalanche.

 

Neeson usually brings some pathos to his action-hero roles, but Mike never seems to have an inner life. Even his devotion to Gurty feels thinly conceived.

Fans of Neeson’s grizzled revenge mode may be satisfied watching him punch some dudes in the face and say things like, “It’s not about money now.

This is personal,” but, more than ever, he seems to just be going through the motions. Thomas doesn’t overplay the mentally challenged aspects of Gurty’s character, although Gurty does seem to be conveniently insightful or incomprehensible depending on the needs of the plot.

Fishburne brings the right balance of snark and grit to Goldenrod, but he exits the movie far too early. Unfortunately, Midthunder is not as engaging a partner for Neeson. Walker turns Varnay into such a sneering villain that by the climax, as he’s seemingly been dealt with so many times that he’s more like the killer in a bad horror movie.

Neeson has taken revenge against corrupt bureaucrats in several movies before, and he battled against the frozen elements to a much more satisfying effect in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey.

 

Everything that he does in The Ice Road, he’s done better in past action thrillers. The Ice Road is a trudge through predictable B-movie beats.

Starring Liam Neeson, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder, Benjamin Walker, Holt McCallany and Laurence Fishburne, The Ice Road is now streaming on Netflix.