Liam Neeson takes on his most ridiculous mission to-date: ice road trucking. If you can still believe the sight of the now 69 year old Irish actor beating up men a third his age, then Netflix has the movie for you. His latest picture, "The Ice Road" belongs to a relatively forgotten genre, the goofy disaster action thriller. It calls to mind 2018's "The Hurricane Heist" more so than any legitimate piece of cinema, with a dopey plot, hokey CGI and sense of misguided fun that makes for an easily-digestible sandwich of aged masculinity with plenty of cheese.
Playing Mike McCann, Neeson is a skilled man but can't hold down a stable job, no small part to being the primary care-giver of his skilled mechanic but disabled veteran brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas). When a diamond mine collapses in Winnipeg, Canada, they answer the call to help transport wellheads across the titular and deadly "ice road." What's in it for them? An equal split of $200,000, which he's hoping is enough for a down payment of their very own rig.
Leading the relatively small cast of secondary characters is Jim, played with usual conviction by Laurence Fishburne, who'll be taking his own semi. With Mike and Gurty in another, this leaves fellow Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) to drive with the tropey corporate "insurance" man (Benjamin Walker). It doesn't take a film scholar to figure out what's going to happen here (the movie's preview trailer doesn't help either).
But that's enough of the formalities; what you need to do is ask yourself two questions: A) can you suspend your disbelief and B) do you like Liam Neeson? If the answered "yes" to both then, OK, quit reading this review, and enjoy the show. If you answered "no" to either or (gasp) both, then well, you can stop too. Only difference is that you will miss out on the hilarious spectacle that is watching the Academy Award winner actor hauling a big rig. The dialogue plays all the stupidity relatively straight, but it can't hide the fact that this is an inherently silly exercise of filmmaking excess. Writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh, who's credits include 1995's equally preposterous "Die Hard with a Vengeance," among many other bombastic pictures, does stage the action with relative finesse. The practical effects are pleasing to the eyes, but are stitched together with unconvincing computer-generated moments, but they only add to its cockeyed charm. And the commitment by the cast is venerable, never acknowledging that they're in a B-movie. All this suggests that everyone involved thought bigger than their seemingly modest budget allowed; slash away a few more millions, film with less famous individuals and you'd have something that could have debuted on cable.
If it sounds like I'm defending this, it's because I am. But I'm struggling to defend the fact that I'm defending it. The "Taken" actor remains stoic as always, and it's just so amusing to see the new and increasingly wacky ways Hollywood keeps coming up with to show Liam in action. The pacing is snappy and there is nary a dull moment; in fact, there were at least two times where I thought "this is it, this is the end," only for something else to happen! It lures you in with its absurdity, lowering your expectations only for it to pull a surprise out of its trucker hat. And by being filmed on location, the cinematography by Tom Stern is sometimes quite beautiful. This barren snowscape helps create a feeling of isolation, as we watch our heroes (and villains) struggle to survive among the elements.
But then I remember that this is a Liam Neeson movie, where he drives an 18-wheeler with a Hawaiian girl dashboard doll.
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