The Ice Road Review

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.

Infinite Review

There's a lot of expectations for movies today. People want bigger universes. Better stories. Smarter writing, the works. But it's a lie. We as humans are sometimes completely satisfied with "mediocre." And that's what the Paramount+ original "Infinite" is. I counted three good scenes and two bad ones- not a bad average for a direct-to-streaming science fiction action flick.

The remainder are boilerplate exposition and boring retreads, but hey, it wasn't like I had anything else to do that night I sat on my couch and pressed "play."

Surprisingly absolutely no one, all the best parts involve car chases, guns and hand-to-hand combat, and director Antoine Fuqua proves once again that he knows how to handle not only the actors but the special effects. They're not all that special themselves, but I could tell who was firing at who and who was tailing who; now that's special.

Mark Wahlberg plays Evan, one of the titular "infinites," who currently can barely pay his bills or even get a job (though he obviously somehow pays for a gym membership). He's also an addict, who forges samurai swords in exchange for his pills. A deal goes wrong, he's arrested, but that sword! That's all it takes for the fellow infinites to find him, both the bad guy Bathurst (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and fellow hero Nora (Sophie Cookson), who busts him out the police station.

Though what the infinites can and can't do is only mildly defined, but a few new abilities are wisely shown over the course of its zippy runtime, allowing for new plot developments and ways to show people in danger. When Evan is hanging onto a plane by nothing but one of his blades of steel, he's able to become unaffected by gravity and walk without issue as the machine roars through the sky. Of course only moments later, he suddenly forgets this power and is bounced about the hull as the aircraft is crashing down. Inconsistencies add a sort of goofy sense of fun to what is otherwise an overly serious series of insignificant stunts.

We travel from set piece to set piece, all an excuse for bullets to fly and people to die. But won't they just be reborn? Bathurst's got that covered; using this special bullet, he's able to trap the "soul" of someone in a computer chip, blocking any and all reawakening. This adds a real threat to our protagonists, something that equally middling works like "The Old Guard" failed to accomplish.

Now I'm not going to herald any of this as particularly original, because it's not. But what is notable is the antagonist's wish: he is simply tired of being reincarnated. No monetary motivation, no plan to dominate the world- he just is done with it all. His honest demands are refreshing in a cinematic marketplace filled with stereotypical incentives of, in Dr. Evil air quotes, money and power. Why doesn't he just shoot himself with one of these unique rounds and save us all the trouble? Hey, I already said there were plot holes.

Of the "bad scenes," they all contain one crucial one thing: dodgy CGI. During that aforesaid jet scene where Wahlberg, or at least his stuntman sprawled out across on a greenscreen, hangs on tight. It's frantically cut to the point of distraction, with a body that moves inorganically like a bad video game.

But that's enough of the negative, because the good stuff is pretty decent. Take when Even is busted out of the precinct, early on, which leads to a vehicular pursuit inside the building. For all I could tell, there were real cars in a real building breaking through real walls and real furniture. Is it thrilling? Not exactly, but it kept me from looking at my phone, which is the real enemy of today's home entertainment.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It Review

Somewhere during the latest "The Conjuring" movie, subtitled "The Devil Made Me Do It," I realized a pattern: the only time something jumped into view of the camera was when someone was somewhere they shouldn't be, like in a bedroom by themselves or when mopping the jail floor. You hear the music stops, and characters look around, telling us the audience to hold onto your bucket of popcorn so you don't spill it in fright. 

Once you identify this pattern, you can never really be scared. This hold true for a lot of horror flicks, but the best ones play you like an instrument, your heartrate going up and down; whether or not there is any "scare" is A) subjective and B) never really the point, it is all about sucking you into the world created by the movie. Alas, this is not one of those movies.

Instead, "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It" is two hours of things that go "boo" a lot, and it's a shame. An adaptation of the Trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, something I'd never heard of until now, we follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, respectively), who are helping with an exorcism of young David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), when the demon leaves the kid's body and sets up shop in Arne, who invited the evil in to save the little boy. Only Ed witnesses what happened, but suffers a major heart attack, giving the now possessed Arne time to kill his and his girlfriend (Sarah Catherine Hook)'s landlord.

The husband and wife team persuade Arne's attorney to plead, ah hem, "the devil made him do it," but need to figure out the why, what, and how of the prosecuted's possessed problem. This leads to a series of stereotypical spooky locations like basements and forests where creepy artifacts cause our leads to gasp at the camera.

I won't spoil the rest of the narrative, because I imagine that fans of this successful franchise live for the "surprise." Only it isn't very surprising, and certainly isn't very scary. But who am I? I am someone looking for a movie to take my breath away with relentless thrills and to haunt me with something more than the sight of men of the cloth shouting the bible at contorting bodies.

I suspect the problem with me even reviewing this is it's optional home release; available in theaters and on HBO Max, I chose the latter. My viewing area can never be as dark as at the cinemas, and without a packed crowd to holler in terror, it removes something vital from it. Alas I can only critique the version I watched, and that's not fair for this latest "Conjuring" entry.