Ice Road: Vengeance Review – Liam Neeson’s Diminishing Returns Continue

There exists a peculiar melancholy in watching Liam Neeson navigate his twilight years through the machinery of contemporary action cinema—a man whose every character seems haunted by ghosts that refuse proper burial. “Ice Road: Vengeance” finds the Irish actor once again inhabiting Mike McCann, though this sequel bears little resemblance to its 2021 predecessor beyond the specter of loss that shadows every frame. Jonathan Hensleigh returns as writer-director, transplanting his protagonist from the frozen expanses of Canada to Nepal’s vertical wilderness, where death lurks not in cracking ice but in the void between mountain peaks.

The premise unfolds with mythic simplicity: Mike journeys to scatter his brother Gurty’s ashes atop Everest, fulfilling a promise that binds the living to the dead. Yet fate—or perhaps the cruel mathematics of genre filmmaking—conspires to entangle him in earthly conflicts involving corrupt politicians, hired killers, and villagers whose ancestral lands face obliteration beneath a hydroelectric dam.

Fan Bingbing emerges as Dhani, a mountain guide whose partnership with Mike transforms from professional courtesy into something approaching kinship forged in violence. What begins as pilgrimage becomes warfare, the sacred journey corrupted by capitalism’s insatiable hunger.

The Theater of Diminished Returns

Neeson’s portrayal of grief carries an authenticity that his action sequences increasingly lack. In quiet moments—adjusting his brother’s urn with trembling hands, speaking to empty air as if Gurty might answer—the actor accesses reservoirs of genuine emotion that recall his theatrical origins. These instances pierce through the film’s genre conventions like light through storm clouds, revealing an artist still capable of profound vulnerability beneath the accumulated armor of commercial necessity.

Yet time remains cinema’s most relentless antagonist. Watching Neeson engage younger adversaries in hand-to-hand combat requires a suspension of disbelief that borders on the surreal. His movements carry the weight of decades, each punch thrown like a prayer that physics might bend to narrative will. Fan Bingbing compensates admirably, her Dhani embodying both fierce competence and emotional intelligence, creating a partnership that feels less romantic than fraternal—two souls united by circumstances beyond their choosing.

The flashbacks featuring Marcus Thomas as Gurty attempt to excavate the brothers’ shared history, though these sequences feel more like exposition dressed in sentiment than genuine excavation of character. The supporting cast aboard the doomed tour bus functions primarily as collateral damage, their individual fates serving the larger machinery of plot rather than exploring the human cost of violence.

Digital Phantoms and Mechanical Dreams

Hensleigh’s technical execution reveals the fundamental tension between ambition and resources that defines modern mid-budget filmmaking. The Nepal setting, ostensibly filmed in Australia, creates a visual contradiction—landscapes that feel simultaneously majestic and artificial, as if viewed through a fever dream of tourism brochures. The green screen work achieves that peculiar quality of contemporary digital effects: sophisticated enough to fool no one, primitive enough to distract constantly from the story’s emotional core.

The film’s action centerpiece—a tour bus careening down mountain roads while passengers battle mercenaries within—generates genuine tension through practical geography rather than digital wizardry. Here, Hensleigh demonstrates understanding that peril feels most authentic when grounded in physical reality. The crane sequence spanning a gorge pushes this principle to its breaking point, achieving moments of vertigo-inducing suspense before succumbing to visual effects that remind viewers they’re watching artifice rather than experiencing danger.

Sound design amplifies the film’s better moments while exposing its weaker ones. Gunfire echoes convincingly across mountain valleys, but digital explosions land with the hollow thud of synthetic percussion. The runtime stretches toward two hours without sufficient spectacle to justify its length, creating a rhythm that stumbles between contemplation and chaos. These pacing issues suggest a film uncertain whether it seeks to be meditation on mortality or crowd-pleasing entertainment.

The Persistence of Sorrow

Beneath its action movie exterior, “Ice Road: Vengeance” grapples with questions that extend beyond mere entertainment: How do we honor the dead while remaining among the living? Can violence ever serve justice, or does it merely perpetuate cycles of suffering? Mike’s journey to Nepal begins as pilgrimage but transforms into something darker—a recognition that grief cannot be deposited at mountain peaks and forgotten, that loss follows us regardless of altitude or geography.

The environmental themes surrounding the dam project feel less developed, serving primarily as moral scaffolding for the central conflict rather than genuine exploration of humanity’s relationship with nature. The corporate villains remain abstractions, their motivations reducible to simple greed rather than the complex systemic forces that actually drive such destruction. This simplification diminishes what might have been a more provocative examination of progress versus preservation.

Fan Bingbing’s Dhani represents the film’s most successful character creation—neither exotic other nor convenient ally, but a woman with her own relationship to the landscape and its threatened communities. Her presence suggests possibilities for cross-cultural understanding that the film’s action requirements prevent from full development. The sequel’s disconnection from its predecessor works in its favor, allowing Mike’s grief journey to exist without the burden of franchise continuity, though this freedom raises questions about why these stories needed shared branding at all.

“Ice Road: Vengeance” succeeds most when it embraces its own absurdity—a 72-year-old man weaponizing his brother’s cremated remains while fighting mercenaries atop a speeding bus achieves a kind of existential comedy that transcends critique. For audiences seeking uncomplicated entertainment, the film provides sufficient thrills. For those hoping to witness Neeson’s dramatic gifts, moments of genuine pathos emerge between the gunfire. Yet one cannot escape the sense that both actor and audience deserve better than this endless repetition of diminishing returns.

Ice Road: Vengeance is an action thriller film and a sequel to the 2021 movie The Ice Road. The movie was released in select theaters in the United States on June 27, 2025, with a video on demand release scheduled for July 1, 2025. It will be available for streaming on HBO Max starting November 25, 2025.

Full Credits

Director: Jonathan Hensleigh

Writers: Jonathan Hensleigh

Producers and Executive Producers: Lee Nelson, David Tish, Eugene Musso, Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein, Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt, Jonathan Hensleigh, David Buelow, Jonathan Dana, Connor Flanagan

Cast: Liam Neeson, Fan Bingbing, Bernard Curry, Geoff Morrell, Marcus Thomas, Mahesh Jadu, Michala Banas, Grace O’Sullivan, Rosie Traynor, Amelia Bishop, Kaden Hartcher, Salim Fayad

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Tom Stern

Editors: Luke Doolan

Composer: Michael Yezerski