The Ice Road: Film Review 

Cast: Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder

Director: Jonathan Hensleigh

Liam Neeson's depressing slide into B-movie territory for the twilight of his career continues in The Ice Road, a film that had real potential, but thanks to massive character underdevelopment feels like a tossed off plot for an episode of a TV show that didn't quite make it past the scripting phase.

Neeson is Mike McCann, a former big-rig trucker, complete with toothpick and loud country and western music introduction, whose latest job is torn from him after he assaults a man teasing his PTSD-ridden younger brother. Elsewhere in the diamond mines of Manitoba in Canada, a large explosion traps a group of miners underground, with rising methane levels threatening any chance of survival.

So when the call goes out to get drivers to bring some well-heads to the disaster site, along the tricky ice roads in the melting climates, Mick and his brother heed the call - along with Laurence Fishburne's Jim and Amber Midthunder's Tantoo.

However, as the convoy sets out, not all is as it seems - and soon Mick is fighting not only for the lives of the miners, but for his own too...

It's hard to imagine how such an intriguing premise of man vs the elements could have been so fouled up, but Hensleigh manages to muddy the whole affair with a mix of no tension whatsoever and a lack of any real development in character throughout.

Neeson gets to gruffly growl some angry lines here and there (chiefly ones like "It's not about money now, it's personal"), throw some punches and avoid some bullets, but the whole "action movie" premise here is anaemic and extremely wanting, thanks to disaster dialogue 101 and plenty of exposition that makes it clear who's to blame from the very beginning.

In truth, when it all goes south within the film's first 35 minutes, you wonder how proceedings will continue given the visceral thrills of ice cracking, an unconscionable climate killer in the form of seasonal thawing and nature at its most primal are likely to figure largely.

But Hensleigh and The Ice Road's scripters manages to turn the film into something that's so generic and bland by concentrating on the human perpetrators that it's hard to remotely care for anyone involved in what little peril there truly is. Bullets whistle, knuckles get cracked, and suspicions loom large, but not once does The Ice Road have any of the tension of an episode of Ice Road Truckers on a quiet day.

Neeson's not helped by stereotyped reactions, and he really does start to look like he's struggling with some of the fight scenes - something made abundantly clear in Honest Thief and The Marksman.

Yet, it's the script's desire to cut back and forth between the road convoy and the miners that sucks most of the oxygen out of any conflict here - and while there's a message lurking about native land rights and corporate negligence and greed, it's so suppressed that you have to scour the admittedly bare landscape to make any of it stick. And those in charge aren't smart enough to revel in the script's pomposity and cliches to make it stand out in any shape or form.

A lack of visceral thrills and a reliance on tedious obvious tropes prove fatal to The Ice Road and places it squarely on thin ice - this one really should be left to thaw in the hot sun and melt away - along with any perception that Neeson's career is going to continue if he keeps turning in turgid dross like this.