Ice Road: Vengeance (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – Mike goes to Nepal to sprinkle his brother’s ashes on Mount Everest. When Mike and his mountain guide come upon mercenaries while traveling on a tour bus, they are forced to fight to save themselves, the passengers, and the country.

My Take – Though, unlike the current majority, I usually tend to enjoy most of Liam Neeson‘s late-career action performances which often sees him ending up in deadly situations and having to fight his way out to survive. However, from the barrage of his off-the-rack releases, I despise 2021’s The Ice Road probably the most.

Released on Netflix, the Jonathan Hensleigh helmed feature had a decent enough premise and saw Neeson play a grizzled trucker who agrees to drive across a frozen lake to rescue a group of miners from a collapsing mine. But the execution is so generic that even avalanches, weak suspension bridges and ice cracks couldn’t raise the experience from being thrill-less.

For some reason, four years later, writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh is back with a sequel. After all, the only real characteristic that qualifies the lead character, Mike McCann, as an action hero is that he can drive heavy vehicles really well. And while it switches tracks to send Neeson from Manitoba to Nepal, to board a local tour bus for a trip to Mount Everest to scatter his late brother’s ashes, the results aren’t exactly better.

Lacking in excitement or interesting characters, more often than not the narrative just revels in mediocrity. Most surprisingly, it doesn’t even live up to the branding as well, with the most notable exclusion being the type of road mentioned in the title.

Sure, some of the action set pieces are decent and the proceedings contain a touch of emotional depth, yet, when it comes down to providing the necessary entertainment – it falls quite short. Destining it to be quickly forgotten, possibly even by fans of its predecessor, as this supposed sequel proves to be as generic as its title.

Here’s hoping that next month’s The Naked Gun reboot will be a unique case and change the course for the acclaimed actor.

The story once again follows Mike McCann (Liam Neeson), a professional trucker, who impulsively decides to travel to Kathmandu, Nepal to fulfill the final request of his late brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) and scatter his ashes on Mt. Everest. Upon arriving, Mike meets up with his Everest guide Dhani (Fan Bingbing) and hops on a bus labeled “Kiwi Express,” manned by cheeky Australian driver Spike (Geoff Morell) to begin the long journey.

However, what should have been a smooth and simple trip soon turns deadly when two would-be kidnappers, including the lethal Jeet (Amelia Bishop), take over the bus in order to abduct one of the passengers, Vijay Rai (Saksham Sharma), the last in line of a local founding family.

A family which has been holding on their land and refusing to give into the construction of a hydroelectric dam, which Rudra Yash (Mahesh Jadu), a businessman with criminal ties, has been pushing for. Naturally, with the violent events folding before them, Mike and Dhani swing into action.

The setup, of course, is primarily an excuse for a string of fights, chases, and its all about as predictable and rote as could be. And yes, much of it involves harrowing drives on treacherous mountain roads, only a few of which, disappointingly, considering the title, have ice on them. Along the way there are plenty of hand-to-hand combats and shootouts, with both Mike and Dhani exhibiting the sort of skills that are unbelievable considering their professions.

But sadly, there isn’t a single action set piece that stands out, even though there are plenty of incidents featuring vehicles dangling precariously on edges. In a lot of ways, this feels like a story from two to three decades ago with its obvious good and bad guy dynamics, and simple town in peril plot.

But what really put me off where the flashbacks sequences. Not only do the dialogue exchanges feel really off, they also seem unnecessary when it comes down to the plot. Honestly, only the setting works here. There’s something far more frightening about the mountainous paths and high-up action here than the stark chill of the previous film, and director Hensleigh takes advantage of such locales in a couple of sequences that certainly make this entry relatively more palatable.

Performance wise, Liam Neeson is simply going through his motions here. But at this point, the 73-year-old just can’t move well enough to make the action believable. While it may have worked 17 years ago in Taken (2008), it sure is getting progressively less believable. Comparatively, Fan Bingbing does better. Though her character serves a similar function to Amber Midthunder’s Tantoo from the first film, the Chinese star enhances her with a sold mix of compassion and badass combat skills. Plus, the two have some solid chemistry.

In supporting turns, Grace O’Sullivan, Saksham Sharma, Geoff Morrell, Bernard Curry and Shapoor Batliwalla do decent work, while the antagonists played by Mahesh Jadu, Shivantha Wijesinha and Amelia Bishop seem content in fully hamming it up. On the whole, ‘Ice Road: Vengeance‘ is yet another routine Liam Neeson action flick that is simply too formulaic and tonally inconsistent to be thoroughly enjoyable.