Moments before screening the new Netflix film The Ice Road, I remarked to my wife that a picture in which Liam Neeson speeds an 18-wheeler across subarctic wastes to rescue trapped miners could not possibly be bad. Alas, thus is the power of Hollywood incompetence. It turns B-movie gold into a frozen handful of slush.
The Ice Road features Neeson as Mike McCann, a driver for hire who dreams of buying his own rig. Accompanying Mike is his war veteran brother, Gurty (Marcus Thomas), whose wizardry as a mechanic is complicated by persistent verbal aphasia. When a methane explosion pins two dozen men beneath a Northern Manitoba diamond pit, seasoned operator Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) recruits the brothers to help haul rescue materials across 300 miles of quickly thinning ice.
Written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher), Netflix’s film knows enough to get its heroes on the road as swiftly as possible. There, joined by fellow trucker Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) and mine representative Tom Varnay (Benjamin Walker), Mike and company push their way north to danger. Awaiting the quintet are sleepless hours, crumbling bridges, and under-ice pressure waves, which cause the very driving surface to sway and ripple. Should the group succeed in delivering their lifesaving payload, the reward will be a sweet $200K.
Like any movie of its kind, The Ice Road makes certain sacrifices of characterization for the sake of effective pacing. Unlike superior productions, however, it settles for gestures that are ham-fisted rather than merely broad. Because the film needs Mike to be tough, Neeson is made to sucker-punch his rivals while uttering such clunkers as, “Oh, now I’m angry.” Since the brothers’ relationship is meant to recall Steinbeck’s George and Lennie, Gurty is portrayed as a holy fool, complete with a fur-covered pet. Worse still are the movie’s supporting players, whose attributes are established via a self-contradicting political shorthand. Tom, a Caucasian male, refers to Tantoo’s First Nations clan as “these people” and is thus evil. Tantoo’s remark that hunger makes her “act white,” meanwhile, is designed to illustrate a laudable audacity and verve.
Given the laziness of these sketches, it is little surprise that Hensleigh puts his characters to predictable use as the film moves into its second and third acts. Having been drawn in invidious shades, Person X is all but guaranteed to betray his comrades in the service of a corrupt agenda. Person Y, whose destiny is equally clear, is certain to press on to the end, while Person Z must give his life to save his friends. To be sure, a round of “Guess Their Fate” is always on offer when one tunes in to a blue-collar American thriller. The Ice Road’s problem is that the game is set on “beginner.” Each member of the film’s dramatis personae barrels toward exactly the conclusion that the audience foresees.
Where Hensleigh’s film does upend expectations, albeit unwisely, is in its decision to abandon a promising man-versus-nature plot in favor of a hackneyed story of corporate malfeasance. Locked behind office doors, subverting the rescuers’ efforts for their own dark purposes, is a collection of management types who make Montgomery Burns look like George Bailey. The point of this cartoonish turn is obvious enough: Hensleigh fancies himself an anti-capitalist truth-teller, and conspiracies are easier to shoot than cold-weather disasters. There’s a reason, however, why The Grey, Neeson’s 2011 subarctic jaunt, declined to blame its wolf attacks on an evil multinational conglomerate. To introduce one-dimensional villains into one’s movie is to render it simplistic, doctrinaire, and dull.
The particular shame of this choice in The Ice Road’s case is how little time it leaves for the outdoor set pieces that the film’s setting ought to have inspired. Though Hensleigh provides a scene or two of icebound danger, the main thrust of the movie is the far more pedestrian struggle between Mike and the mission’s entrenched saboteur, a man whose persistence is as tedious as it is grim. In addition to lacking the visceral punch of grander sequences, the pair’s physical altercations offer next to nothing in terms of novel or compelling staging. (Is it possible to mount a fight in and around a truck’s cab without copying Raiders of the Lost Ark?) There is, of course, nothing wrong with visual allusion, and films about scuffling antagonists can be entertaining enough. But if the picture one actually hopes to make is Indiana Jones and the Deranged Corporate Henchman, why bother schlepping the crew all the way to remotest Canada?
For that matter, why urge so feeble a script upon the aging Neeson, who played a violent snowplow driver a mere two years ago (in Cold Pursuit) and ought not to be wasting his late prime playing a violent ice road trucker now? The answer, almost too glaring for words, is money. If Hensleigh wants to tell a story of capitalism gone awry, he could do worse than to write about that.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
