Ice Road: Vengeance Review
Ice Road: Vengeance (2025) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh and starring Liam Neeson, Bingbing Fan, Marcus Thomas, Grace O’Sullivan, Saksham Sharma, Bernard Curry, Geoff Morrell, Mahesh Jadu, Amelia Bishop, Shivantha Wijesinha, Michala Banas, Salim Fayad, Kaden Hartcher and Seth Kannof.
In Albert Brooks’ 1999 comedy, The Muse, a screenwriter tries to sell a major motion picture studio an action movie and the studio representative explains to Brooks’s character that the script for the action movie simply is flat and has no edge. The executive goes on to say, “It feels like it has been done before.” Ice Road: Vengeance is an in-name sequel that may be flat, have no edge and feel like it has been done before, yet here we are. Liam Neeson is back reprising his character from the first The Ice Road picture. I’ve never seen Neeson this lacking in energy, but he does (barely) meet the demands of the role in the most basic way. Look, director Jonathan Hensleigh has a plot that could have served Neeson’s talents justice. It just doesn’t. That’s mainly because the logistics of the plot are ludicrous and the film is way too long at almost two hours in length.
This movie’s plot begins with some heavy political themes in which a key character is late to speak to a group of anxious people. Let’s take it back a notch, though. As the film’s central story line initially opens up, we meet Neeson’s Mike McCann who is struggling with the death of his brother (Marcus Thomas) and is talking to a psychiatrist (Michala Banas) about ways to improve. He’s been making poor and challenging life choices. He climbed a mountain he shouldn’t have and the psychiatrist offers literature and medicine to cope. He takes the literature and leaves behind the medicine. In short order, he’s off to sprinkle his dead brother’s ashes in the appropriate place and when he arrives at his destination in Nepal, he is expecting a male mountain guide, but gets a female one- the wise Dhani Yangchen (played with precision by Bingbing Fan who may be the best thing about this film).
On a bus filled with other colorful characters, a vicious woman boards with a gun (a well-cast Amelia Bishop) and threatens the lives of the riders. Dhani translates the dialogue she hears and it states that no witnesses should be left alive. So, what does Mike do? He finds a hole on the bottom of the bus right by his feet to open up so he can flatten the tire and halt the bus. The woman with the weapon is taken into custody, but if it were as simple as that, there’d be no movie. No need to give away spoilers. If you’re going to see this movie, you’re going to go no matter how the plot develops.
There are simply too many shots of the bus taken from a long distance and, sometimes, these scenes feel like stock footage. This movie needed another day in the editing room to find the story’s center and clear up some needless shots that don’t advance the story line. A scene where Neeson’s character is balancing the bus to save his brother’s ashes is absurd and would have been the first sequence to go from the film if I was editing it. Then, we’d get rid of a lot of those long shots which don’t add the intended tension to the story line.
Neeson is growing weary of bad roles and it shows. He looks like he’s memorizing his lines for the new upcoming Naked Gun movie here rather than being fully immersed in the role. I liked the first film which was on Netflix. It was entertaining and fit the title. There isn’t a quarter as much ice on the roads here this time out, making it feel a bit like false advertising. There are, however, a slew of supporting performers backing Neeson up who feel like they were hand-picked out of a group of tourists thus they feel authentic. There’s a professor (Bernard Curry), his daughter (Grace O’Sullivan) and the driver, played by Geoff Morrell. All come into play in the story line in one way or another.
If you enjoyed the first film, you may like this movie, but you’ll see Neeson isn’t as solid as he usually has been in the lead roles he has played in action films such as this one. Neeson, we know, has a very particular set of skills as an action hero and is entitled to a bad movie once in a while, but, you know what, if you changed the title, this movie may have gotten a half a point higher. I went in expecting ice roads and didn’t get what I wanted which definitely lessens the score on the film. Had they called it, Vengeance, Ashes or Takeover, it would have felt just as generic and flat, but wouldn’t have had me expecting ice roads that I didn’t get in the anticipated quantity.
Rating: 5.5/10
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