The Ice Road

UK Release Date. 25 June 2021
Certification. 12
Running Time. 1 hour 49 mins
Director. Jonathan Hensleigh
Cast. Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder, Liam Neeson, Marcus Thomas.
Rating. 29%

Review.

One month after Star Wars exploded onto the big screen, William Friedkin released Sorcerer. Drowned out by the Star Wars phenomenon, the film performed poorly at the box office and was much maligned at the time, but Sorcerer remains one of the most iconic films of the decade. Complex and morally ambiguous, Sorcerer is a masterclass in escalating tension.

Jonathan Hensleigh's The Ice Road, on the other hand, isn't exactly huge, ten-wheeled trucks hauling highly volatile nitroglycerine through the perilous South American jungle. Even if the film's initial premise is approximate to that of Friedkin's tour de force.

The opening titles of The Ice Road inform the audience that ice road truck drivers are tasked with an unimaginably dangerous job, having to haul behemoth vehicles that weigh up to 65,000lb over frozen lakes, straits and oceans on ice less than 30 inches thick. It’s an ingenious set up. The three trucks can't travel too fast, or they'll cause waves beneath the ice that make the roads ripple and buckle. Conversely, the three trucks can't travel too slow, or the concentrated pressures on the tyres will cause the ice to crack underneath them. But the writer and director, Jonathan Hensleigh (whose writing credits include Die Hard: With A Vengeance, Armageddon and The Punisher), isn’t able to generate enough peril, suspense or tension. Instead, the film stalls with a lacklustre plot, and a cast of under-developed hackneyed characters cobbled together from spare archetypal parts. The sight of a gruff and grizzled Liam Neeson battling white-out conditions may also lead to comparisons with the survival thriller, The Grey. But at least Neeson's character in The Grey, John Ottway possessed a shred of personality. In The Ice Road Neeson plays, Mike McCann, a character devoid of anything remotely distinguishable. 

In the hands of John McTiernan, Kathyrn Bigelow, or even Joe Carnahan - filmmakers who all have an incredible grasp of how to film action sequences - The Ice Road may have been much more impressive. But still, it is highly unlikely it would have reached the height's of William Friedkin's Sorcerer. Few have.