Ice Road: Vengeance

Running Out of Ice: The Weary Momentum of Liam Neeson

There’s something grimly funny about sitting down for a movie called *Ice Road: Vengeance* and discovering there are, in fact, no ice roads anywhere in it. Maybe that counts as a joke, maybe it's just sequel inertia doing its thing. Either way, that is where we are. In 2025 Liam Neeson is back as Mike McCann, still in his flannel, this time winding through the dry, dusty, dangerously narrow roads of Nepal to scatter his brother’s ashes. (The Himalayas are actually regional Australia, but let's not poke that too hard.) The setup is instantly familiar: grieving man seeks peace, accidentally stumbles into a regional warzone. Clint Worthington summed up the fatigue at RogerEbert.com when he wrote that the film "barely stands apart from any of the other baker’s dozen punch-em-ups Neeson has led in the last decade." Hard to argue.



Jonathan Hensleigh returns to direct. This is the same writer who gave us *Die Hard with a Vengeance*, someone who once had a keen feel for how action should move through space. Maybe that instinct is just on low battery here. The filmmaking is mostly utilitarian, cut down to whatever is needed to get the plot from one checkpoint to the next. The framing stays tight, likely to disguise budget seams, and everything is smeared in dusty sepia. No one comes to a movie like this for visual revelation, but there are stretches where you can almost sense the crew wanting to clock out.

Still, the set-pieces have a stubborn B-movie usefulness when Hensleigh actually leans on the environment. The best stretch has a hijacked tour bus tethered to a heavy cable to slow its slide down a mountain road with sheer drops on either side. It is ludicrous, pure matinee nonsense, but the sound design does serious work. The winch screams, the tires snap against gravel, the whole cabin lists at ugly angles. For a few minutes, the weak green-screen fades into the background and you feel the mass of that bus hanging one bad second away from disaster.



Then there's Neeson, who at this point brings his own theme of weariness to every frame. Watching him now means watching age register in real time. He no longer moves like a conventional action lead; he moves like somebody hauling an old dresser up the stairs and refusing help. The shoulders sink. The walk is stiff. When he throws a punch, his whole body seems to resent the effort. Oddly, that helps. A younger star might make all this look slick. Neeson makes it look like labor, which suits Mike's grief. During his fight with the mercenary Jeet in the cramped bus aisle, there's nothing elegant about it. It's just two worn-out people heaving themselves at each other until one of them stays down.

Fan Bingbing, as mountain guide Dhani, supplies the movie with the energy it badly needs. After years of navigating international co-productions and plenty of off-screen turbulence, she drops into this B-picture with brisk, precise force. Where Neeson lumbers, she cuts. In that first bus standoff, her eyes are already measuring exits and weapons while everyone else is still catching up. She gives Dhani enough practical intelligence that the character stops feeling like generic sidekick support and starts resembling someone who actually belongs in this terrain.



I'm not going to pretend the movie is secretly good. The script is built out of blunt declarative lines, and the evil-developer subplot is so flimsy you could read through it. But there is also a perverse kind of comfort in how little the film cares about being anything else. No lore, no mythology, no universe expansion—just an old man working his grief out on armed thugs while trying not to go over a cliff. Whether that simplicity feels refreshing or desperate depends on how much patience you still have for this kind of thing. For a while, at least, the bus keeps moving, even when you can tell the tank is basically dry.