Generally, I try and avoid reading any reports of a movie before going in, but the general reaction to The Ice Road was pretty hard to miss. “Not very impressive” pretty much sums it up.
But at first, I couldn’t see what the problem was. The opening was certainly arresting enough.
Photo: Netflix
The Ice Road, we’re told, is one of the most dangerous journeys on Earth. Way up in the frozen north of Canada, the only way to get equipment where it’s needed is over frozen-solid lakes. At least, you hope they’re frozen-solid.
So all a movie called The Ice Road has to do, you’d think, is dramatize “where it’s needed”. In this case it’s a cave-in at a diamond mine in Manitoba.
The good news is there’s a huge gizmo you can use to rescue the trapped miners. The bad news is it needs to be hauled – you’ve guessed it – along the Ice Road.
Unfortunately, all the reliable drivers are busy elsewhere. So, the only ones available to trucking boss Laurence Fishburne are colourful renegades like Mike – Liam Neeson – and his autistic brother Gurty.
The third truck is allocated to a woman - First Nation trucker Tantoo, who actually has to be sprung from jail before she can take the wheel.
Tantoo is played by an actress with my favourite name this week - Amber Midthunder.
As the three trucks head north over the Ice Road, the prospect of the movie delivering looks good. It is, after all, an Arctic twist on that French suspense classic Wages of fear.
In that film, you may remember, the trucks are carrying dangerously volatile explosives over rocky terrain. Here, it’s the road itself providing the danger.
The ice in the Ice Road has worn perilously thin, thanks to global warming, and the trucks’ heavy loads will be lucky to survive at all, let along get there in time.
So, dangerous enough, surely? But the producers disagree.
What, they wonder, if in addition the trucks have also been booby-trapped by bad guys?
This seems to be adding more plot than you need. We’ve already got a ticking clock down in the mine where Tantoo’s brother is among the trapped miners.
And it’s patently clear that of the three gigantic trucks rumbling to their rescue, not all of them are going to make it over the fast-cracking ice.
I mean, in some of the most inhospitable territory on the planet, do we also need villainous saboteurs, hitmen on snow-mobiles and endless polar punch-ups?
OK, the stunt-work on The Ice Road is pretty spectacular. And if you’re unfamiliar with how to operate big rigs in a blizzard, there are a few surprises.
Did you know how to right a truck that’s capsized on the ice, for instance? Me neither.
But long before the end, you start to suspect the enthusiastic stunt crew has taken over the shoot, and the rest of the production are too cold to argue. Do you want to see another thing a truck can do in the snow? Sure, go ahead, whatever…
In the end the Ice Road starts to turn into a road to nowhere, I’m afraid.
