The life of a late-career Liam Neeson character is often a tragic one: In one film or another, he’s a cop, or a hitman, or a doctor/banker/working stiff, usually estranged from one family member or another, at the end of his rope. One day, he’s thrust, as if by fate, into a deathly situation that requires the use of his particular set of skills (or, if he lacks them, just the scrappy intensity a Neeson character innately carries). The man can never know peace; he’s cursed, in an Odyssean kind of way, to throw haymakers at gritted teeth at one leather-jacketed goon after another until his septuagenarian bones finally crumble like so much Irish chalk. He’s been doing this kind of thing since “Taken,” so much so that he’s finally able to poke fun at it later this year in a “Naked Gun” legacyquel.
But for every collab with Jaume Collet-Serra (arguably the director behind his most successful efforts, like “Non-Stop” and “Run All Night”), there’s a murderer’s row of ho-hum VOD entries that feel ready-made to give the man a steady paycheck. 2021’s straight-to-Netflix “The Ice Road” was one of them, giving Neeson a shot at a “Wages of Fear” riff as an ice road driver tasked with traversing a dangerous ice road to accomplish his goal. I emphasize those words because, for being an ostensible sequel, “Ice Road: Vengeance” features zero ice roads. In fact, writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh’s follow-up barely stands apart from any of the other baker’s dozen punch-em-ups Neeson has led in the last decade.
Since last we saw him, Neeson’s Mike McCann has been trapped in grief after the events of the first “Ice Road,” which ended with his PTSD-addled military vet brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) sacrificing himself to save the day. In his stead, McCann has been filling his time with daredevil antics—the opening minutes see Neeson, a la William Shatner in “Star Trek V,” pretending to free-climb a mountain—to deal with his survivor’s guilt. Not only that, he’s on a mission to fulfill Gurty’s last wishes: To scatter his ashes at the top of Mt. Everest, which he never got to climb in life. (Seems quite the ask to make someone else reach the summit for him, but I digress.)
After buying a one-way ticket to Nepal (and transferring his brother’s ashes into a TSA-approved Tupperware; “Sorry, bro,” he mutters as he scrapes some of the ashes off the toilet rim in the bathroom), McCann finds himself in Kathmandu, where he meets up with his mountain guide, Dhani (Fan Bingbing). But hardly a moment passes after they sit down on the brightly-colored bus that’s meant to take them up the base of the mountain that they find themselves in a fistfight with a group of assassins determined to kidnap a young Nepalese man (Shaksham Sharma). Mike and Dhani showcase surprising fighting skills in the close quarters of the bus—especially Mike, who wasn’t exactly John Wick in the first “Ice Road”—and discover not long after the melee that they’ve stepped in the middle of an assassination plot involving dam building, crooked industrialists (Rhash Jadu’s Rudra Yash) and a murdered politician. From there, they, along with a curiously plugged-in American professor (Bernard Curry) and the bus’s other passengers, have to outrun crooked cops and leather-clad hitmen all the way up Everest.
While they’re hardly icy, I suppose “Vengeance” does at least feature plenty of roads, and plenty of opportunities for Neeson’s McCann, ever skilled behind the wheel, to navigate the bus (called the “Kiwi Express”) over steep climbs and sharp corners. In between, he’s got to punch up with a baddie or two, and he and Bingbing spring into action with a flexibility that doesn’t gel with their stated occupations. But this is the kind of film where the average joe, when faced with life or death, will become an eager sharpshooter; by film’s end, everyone from the chipper Aussie bus driver (Geoff Morell) to the professor’s bratty, phone-obsessed daughter (Grace O’Sullivan) will happily pack heat.
It’s all very silly, and I wish it were silly in the fun way. Alas, this thing clocks in at nearly two hours, and Tom Stern’s cramped, flat cinematography leans too hard on the innate exoticism of the Kathmandu setting to provide visual interest. The fights themselves are no great shakes, with punches thrown at rehearsal speed and chintzy After Effects muzzle flashes. None of the flat performances around Neeson do him many favors, and even he just seems tired. (Don’t even get me started on the goofy Gurty flashbacks, featuring some of the creakiest de-aging I’ve seen in a minute, as if someone just smeared Vaseline on the lens where Liam’s crow’s feet would be.)
There’s nothing in “Ice Road: Vengeance” that isn’t in any given Redbox/Saban Films Neeson actioner you’ve seen in the last dozen years, and you’ll at least get to the good stuff quicker there. As is, it might be the end of the old ice road for Neeson, unless “The Naked Gun” can give him some juicier, more self-effacing material to chew on.
