The best thing that I can say about The Ice Road, now the number 5 rated movie in the United States, is that it won't really harm you. This is because the picture is completely forgettable. If you watch the movie, and, then, go out to the grocery store to pick up some cans of soup, celery, perhaps, some hamburger patties, you will have forgotten everything about the movie by the time you get home. A loud, if mercifully short, action picture involving drivers piloting semi-trucks over frozen lakes in Manitoba, the film is completely implausible, contrived, and formulaic. Liam Neeson as a tough trucker gets to punch a few people in the face. There are explosions and Mad Max-style chases across the tundra with snowmobiles substituted for motorcycles and a few trucks sink into the frigid northern waters. Despite many casualties, all is well in the end. The movie plows forward breathlessly, never taking a break, and it's fortunate that the picture is only 92 minutes long because proceedings become very tiresome in the movie's last half-hour -- the same stuff just keeps happening over and over again. You can see this movie on Netflix. But I don't recommend it.
The Ice Road is loosely based on Henri Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (and William Friedkin's ultra-aggressive remake, Sorcerer): truckers undertake a suicide mission to transport supplies necessary to a rescue workers trapped in an underground mine. (In Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear, the truckers transport volatile and highly explosive nitroglycerine over mountain roads in some central American country -- the explosives are needed to extinguish a huge fire burning in an oil-field; the mission is complicated by crumbling roads, deadly suspension bridges, and a tropical storm.) In The Ice Road, the miners can't be extracted from their shaft without first pumping out methane gas infiltrating the mine, a process that requires an enormous "well-head" too heavy to transport by air to the remote mine. The viewer will labor in vain to make any sense out of this mission. We don't know for sure what a "well-head" is -- when installed, the thing looks like some kind of turbine, although it's apparently equipment used in oil extraction. Why a "well-head" is required as opposed to some other simpler way of ventilating the mine-shaft is unclear. Similarly, if the mine is full of high-concentrations of methane, then, what are the trapped workers breathing? I would expect them to have been suffocated shortly after the initial blast sealed them in the crypt underground. The explosion has occurred in April and the infamous ice-roads become too dangerous to traverse after mid-March, so, of course, the mining company hires three morons to drive three huge trucks (color-coded Red, Black, and Yellow) to transport three identical well-heads to the mine -- there are three trucks because it's expected that two of them won't make it. This mission is a bit quixotic because the mining firm has hired the three most incompetent drivers in the history of trucking -- an Irishman, McCann who is always angry and punching people in the face (Liam Neeson), a bitter Cree Indian woman who happens to be a cracker-jack ice-road trucker -- she's named Tatoon; a Black ice-road trucking expert, Mr. Goldenrod, played by Laurence Fishburne. According to the code that governs these movies, the Black character is cannon-fodder, sent on the mission to dramatically show what might happen to the other trucks if they get in trouble and he's dragged down into the icy deep, with his semi-tractor and trailer before the movie is half-done. There's a lot of "virtue signaling" in the film -- Tatoon is a traumatized, but tough-as-nails First Nations woman. The villains, who turn out to be legion in this film, are corporate types,who for some reason have decided to murder the miners and thwart their own rescue mission. (The idiotic motivation for their villainy is that the mine bosses have shut off the methane sensors in the pit, presumably to save a few shekels -- but the mine bosses efforts to thwart the rescue, asphyxiate the workers in the shaft, and send the three semi-trucks to the bottom of Lake Winnipeg, measures that require a small army of thugs on snowmobiles, will cost the company millions and millions of dollars. If we posit that corporations make cold-blooded calculations on the basis of profits and losses, of course, shutting off the methane sensors makes no sense and the spectacular, bloody effort to thwart the rescue mission, resulting in as many casualties as there are trapped miners, is simply ridiculous -- this villainous company needs to fire its accountants and bookkeepers ASAP.) Along for the ride is McCann's badly damaged brother, a brain-injured Iraq war vet (more virtue signaling) who is aphasic and speaks like a mentally retarded Yoda. This character is so ludicrous and irritating, the less said about him, the better. The villainous mining firm has sent an effete risk management bureaucrat to supervise the rescue mission -- he wears an absurd-looking beret and has a big vocabulary, but he turns out to be the bad ass of all bad asses, the secret hero of the film, a villain who just won't stop attacking the good guys. By comparison, he makes the heroes look like inept milquetoasts. The war veteran has a pet rat that he keeps in a nasty-looking iron cage. This is supposed to be endearing but seems to be some particularly baroque form of rat torture -- the poor thing is kept in a grated iron casket the size of a shoe box. The rat is mostly forgotten for almost all of the movie until one scene in which the long-suffering, tormented creature gets to bite the equally long-suffering and tormented bad ass actuary. (How the rat manages to bite the guy through its iron prison with it's little grated air-hole is totally unclear.) Needless to say, the truckers don't have a clue. They drive on the lake spaced at 200 yards so as not to concentrate the weight of the trucks on the unstable ice. (There's a nice aurora borealis show overhead.) However, at the first sign of trouble, the trucks all gather tightly together and, so, of course, the ice breaks and poor Mr. Goldenrod, who seems to be a complete fool, get's his leg caught in the cable-winch and is dragged into icy Lake Winnipeg. The truckers are constantly using winches to get themselves out of a fix, something of a problem because they obviously don't know how their winches work. (And the film maker doesn't know how the winches work either -- the winches are just devices that magically fix problems before tearing apart and hurling metal at everyone.) Here's a specimen of the stupidity of the heroes -- Ms. Tatoon and McGann's mentally challenged brother drive their wobbling semi-tractor-trailer forward, creeping across a suspension bridge, a cold weather version of the tattered span in Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. Of course, the bridge collapses under them. However, somehow, the semi-tractor-trailer makes it to the other side. Then, although everyone is in a panicked hurry to save the miners (one of whom is Tatoon's brother), she stops the truck on an incline and she and the mentally disabled fellow stroll back behind the vehicle to gawk at the fallen bridge and the canyon over which it was suspended. Apparently, Ms. Tatoon has failed to put the truck in park -- maybe,she's left it in neutral -- with the result that the massive rig rolls backward and, after lots of Sturm und Drang, crushes the poor mentally deficient guy like a bug between the trailer and big fence that has suddenly magically appeared. This is sheer negligence. The movie cuts back and forth between the dim-witted rescuers and the poor miners in the hole -- they bicker about whether killing the wounded to reduce "the number of lungs" consuming their precious oxygen. By the last half-hour, the viewer's sympathies have completely shifted to the hapless salary-men working for the Company. These guys are killed in droves, displaying a heroic, if somewhat pitiful, loyalty to the evil corporation that pays their wages. Instead of just refusing to implement the villainous orders of management, these heroes valiantly hurl themselves under trucks, lunge from snowmobiles to fight hand-to-hand with the ironfisted Liam Neeson, and get killed in all sorts of picturesque ways. The most wicked villain, the actuary, is also the most heroic -- this guy is indefatigable: he gets dragged miles on his ass under trucks, flung off cliffs, beaten by just about everyone in the movie, bit by a rat, and, still, is willing to go toe-to-toe with Liam Neeson in a gory battle on the ice that just goes on and on, a tedious fight that looks like a couple of pro-Hockey players laboriously pounding at one another on a skating rink. You have to admire this villain's pluck and determination and his willingness to give his all for his wicked mission.
The movie is not quite bad enough to be amusing. It's, more or less, an annoying drag. Here are some samples of its dialogue: upon joining the mission -- "I'm in!" Liam Neeson after learning that the mining corporation is trying to kill them -- "This is personal to me!"; after the first truck gets drowned: "Hang on! This is gonna get ugly!" Upon revealing his villainous scheme, the evil actuary says: "Let's just say I work for a different part of the company," meaning he works in the department with offices near R & D, the M & M division (standing for Murder and Mayhem); dialogue from the trapped miners: "We're getting out of here together or not at all!" and Liam Neeson again proclaiming that he's an angry fellow: "Oh, now I'm angry. It's not about money now!" Of course, it's all about money. I assume people got paid a fortune to participate in this thing. Neeson is 68 and much too old for this kind of nonsense. (I understand he's filming a movie in Berlin as I write, predictably called Retribution -- ever since saving the Jews in Schindler's List, he's been on a mission to beat up bad guys and save everyone else to boot.)
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