The Ice Road – Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh: Movie Review

The Ice Road is a slow-burn action-thriller written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh, set on the treacherous ice roads of Manitoba, Canada. It arrives with a solid cast and enough middle-of-the-road action enjoyment to haul the audience across the film’s 109-minute finish line without sinking under the weight of its story.

The real-life ice roads of Manitoba are fascinating; perilous, treacherous masses of natural ice road which often serve as the only route of delivery for essential goods and supplies to Canada’s most remote locations.

These connecting road systems cross streams, rivers, lakes, muskeg (bogs), and rock ridges, feature no safety or speed signage, have no maintenance schedule, and require heavy-load truckers to drive according to strict conditions.

Trucks have vastly extended braking distances due to both ice and visibility, can travel in either direction but must stay primarily in the centre to reduce the overbalance of weight on the ice due to the embankment, and should avoid stopping entirely as the concentrated weight of a heavier load may cause it to plummet through the ice.

The most terrifying of these conditions is the potential for sudden ice waves, which require drivers to maintain a speed of around 15 km/h, drive up to 1km apart, and be constantly aware of any change to the conditions or their position on the road.

Drive too slow and you’ll sink, drive too fast and you’ll sink everyone.

Such is The Ice Road, an ambitious action-thriller film with themes and characters that would feel more at home in the late ‘90s, and one which cautiously feathers its accelerator across its nearly two-hour runtime in an effort to keep it afloat.

The film stars Liam Neeson as Mike McCann, a no-nonsense, straight-talking, punch-happy trucker who has been caring for his war-veteran-turned-mechanic brother, Gurty (Marcus Thomas), while the duo hops from job to job, assumedly because Mike punches anyone who picks on his brother and human resources don’t exist in Canada.

As Mike and Gurty begrudgingly depart their latest gig, an explosion at a remote mine traps 26 miners, leading to an emergency text message from Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), calling for ice-road truckers willing to haul gigantic, overweight wellheads to the mining outpost in less than 30 hours to save the trapped miners inside.

Although offered a four-way share of $200,000, complicating matters along the way is Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) a former employee of Goldenrod and a badass trucker who begins as a promising, nuanced character but is unfortunately reduced to largely snappy comebacks and sassy indifference.

Joining her is Varnay (Benjamin Walker), an insurance risk assessor working for Katka, the company that owns the mine, who has no reason to be there but hastily explains his presence away in a Chekhov’s Risk Assessor manner then spends much of the first act irritating and hitting on Tantoo.

We meet our anti-heroes and the miners (held together by the always-excellent Holt McCallany), we learn that Katka is fuelled by greed and its executives are whiskey-drinking cowards, we watch Mike give a rather pointed speech about the opioid epidemic and inhuman treatment of war veterans, and we discover Tantoo may or may not have ulterior motives for tagging along.

While the film spends considerable time building up this initial expository section, it provides the necessary groundwork for the rest of the film, which slams its foot on the accelerator the moment our trio of trucks hit the ice.

Tantoo explains the dangers of the ice roads to Varnay and the audience, and the film settles into a delightful state of anxiety and tightrope dread as things predictably go wrong. Unfortunately, this emotional state runs out of gas shortly after the first of many twists, leaving the viewer stranded impatiently on the ice instead of pursued by that sudden sense of impending doom.

While the film does manage to tie up many of its loose threads and offers a relatively satisfying conclusion, many of its underlying elements feel abandoned by the end, where the film tries to haul just too many concepts and discussion points across its journey.

Gurty’s condition of aphasia – or, perhaps, dysphasia – is often either used for woeful comedy or as a way to just feed Neeson some lines. And many of the characters who start off as potential foundations for growth just settle comfortably into their clichéd caricatures by the film’s end.

For a film so primed to lunge at conversations such as the horrific drug abuse prevalent with both long-haul truckers and veterans alike, any chance of dualism in the characters falls by the wayside when everyone gives up and just decides to let good guys be good guys and bad guys be bad guys.

Perhaps this is a consequence of writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh, the man responsible for writing The Rock, Con Air, Gone in 60 Seconds, Die Hard with A Vengeance, and Jumanji, where hyper-charismatic leads and wild, unpredictable energy from the cast and story provided less time to focus on the shortcomings of the script.

In the end, this is where the journey of The Ice Road takes us; nowhere special in particular, and where the surrounding scenery is both more beautifully tragic and treacherous than anything the characters can provide, culminating in an enjoyable and occasionally exciting, but largely cold, narrative that feels too long for what it manages to achieve and tragically stops short of what it could have.

Director: Jonathan Hensleigh

Starring: Liam Neeson  Laurence Fishburne, Benjamin Walker, Amber Midthunder, Marcus Thomas, Holt McCallany, Martin Sensmeier, Matt McCoy, Matt Salinger

Oxford Lamoureaux

Ice Road opens on 23 September.