There’s something heartbreakingly predictable about the life of a late-career Liam Neeson character. He’s usually a weathered man, someone with a past that’s either full of pain, violence, or regret—or all three. Sometimes he’s a cop. Other times, a hitman, a doctor, or maybe just a blue-collar guy trying to hold it all together. He’s often estranged from family, clinging to a thread of purpose, when fate—or screenwriting necessity—throws him into a brutal showdown. Suddenly, he’s back in action, fists flying, jaws clenched, voice gravelly, bringing the pain to some unfortunate goons who didn’t know they were about to get Neeson’d.
It’s become a genre unto itself since Taken hit like a sledgehammer in 2008. Since then, Neeson has fought his way through dozens of similar films. He’s become a cinematic archetype: the reluctant, haunted man who never finds peace, only enemies. He’s basically the Irish version of Odysseus—cursed to wander, to fight, to suffer, and to never really come home. Now, more than a decade later, he’s set to spoof himself in the upcoming Naked Gun reboot, which might finally give him the break he (and we) deserve.
But before we get to the parody, we have to slog through another round of gravel-voiced vengeance. Enter Ice Road: Vengeance, the sequel to 2021’s The Ice Road, a straight-to-Netflix thriller that featured Neeson navigating frozen terrain in a big rig. That first movie tried to do a modern-day Wages of Fear riff, throwing our aging action star into peril on cracking ice and calling it a day.
The sequel, however, ditches the icy premise almost entirely—which is a bit odd, considering the word “ice” is right there in the title. Instead of slick, white danger, we get dust, mountains, and surprisingly warm roads in Nepal. If The Ice Road was about survival against nature, Ice Road: Vengeance is more like a messy, low-budget Bourne movie set on a budget tour bus.
What Happened to the Ice?
So what is Ice Road: Vengeance about? Well, our hero Mike McCann (Neeson, naturally) is still reeling from the traumatic loss of his brother Gurty, who died during the events of the first film. Gurty was a military vet with PTSD, and his death weighs heavily on Mike. To cope, Mike’s taken to some extreme hobbies. The film opens with him solo-climbing a cliff, Star Trek V style, a wild sight considering Neeson is now in his early 70s. He’s not just climbing for kicks though—he’s fulfilling his late brother’s final wish: to scatter Gurty’s ashes on the summit of Mount Everest.
Yes, Gurty apparently wanted his remains carried to the highest point on Earth, which is a tall order (literally) for anyone, let alone a grieving trucker with no mountaineering experience. But McCann is committed. He books a one-way flight to Nepal and, in one of the movie’s more unintentionally hilarious scenes, transfers his brother’s ashes from a decorative urn into a plastic container that’s TSA-compliant. “Sorry, bro,” he mutters as he clumsily scoops some remains out of a public toilet.
Trouble in the Himalayas
Once in Kathmandu, McCann meets his mountain guide, Dhani (played by Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing). The two barely have time to exchange pleasantries before the plot kicks into overdrive. While riding on a brightly-painted tourist bus headed toward Everest, they’re ambushed by a group of assassins trying to kidnap a young Nepalese man named Tenzing (Shaksham Sharma).
McCann, despite showing little sign of being a professional fighter in the first film, suddenly turns into a near-John Wick in the tight confines of the bus. Dhani too gets in on the action, displaying fighting chops that raise questions about her backstory. The bus fight is chaotic, clumsy, and loud—exactly the kind of sequence you expect from this tier of action flick.
From here, the movie pivots hard into conspiracy territory. Turns out they’ve stumbled into a political assassination plot. A powerful industrialist named Rudra Yash (Rhash Jadu) is trying to cover up corruption related to a dam project. A politician’s murder, a group of rogue cops, and a rogue’s gallery of generic villains follow as our unlikely team attempts to get Tenzing to safety while climbing toward Everest. Joining the group is an American professor (Bernard Curry) and his bratty teenage daughter, whose phone obsession is played for easy laughs before she inevitably becomes a gun-toting survivor by the film’s end.
A Road Too Long
Now, while there might not be ice, there are plenty of roads. The Kiwi Express, as the bus is called, careens over sharp Himalayan cliffs and narrow paths, all while McCann and Dhani fend off increasingly absurd threats. The physics are cartoonish. The dialogue is generic. And the pacing? Let’s just say a 90-minute version of this movie might’ve been passable. But Vengeance stretches things to nearly two hours, and boy, does it feel like it.
The action sequences, which should be the movie’s highlight, are disappointing. The punches look rehearsed. The muzzle flashes are so obviously fake they could’ve been done in iMovie. There’s no weight to the fights, no rhythm to the chaos. Even Neeson, who’s always been a surprisingly effective action star despite his age, looks like he’s just going through the motions. He’s tired, and you can feel it.
It doesn’t help that the cinematography leans hard on the “exotic” setting of Kathmandu, trying to wring visual interest out of colorful buses and narrow alleys. But the shots are flat and cramped, as if the camera is afraid to move too far in any direction. There’s none of the grandeur or awe you’d expect from a story that, on paper, involves climbing Everest. Instead, the film feels cheap and small.
Gurty’s Ghost and Other Goofiness
To try and tug at our heartstrings, the movie includes a series of flashbacks to McCann and Gurty’s relationship. But these scenes, featuring poorly de-aged versions of Neeson and Marcus Thomas, land with a thud. The de-aging tech is distractingly bad—more Vaseline-on-the-lens than The Irishman. Rather than emotional, these moments just feel awkward and artificial, like deleted scenes from a bad video game cutscene.
The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better. Fan Bingbing’s Dhani is underwritten, Curry’s professor is just there for exposition, and the villains are about as threatening as mall cops in leather jackets. Everyone plays their role straight, but there’s no spark, no chemistry, no joy in the performances. And that’s a big part of the problem.
See, this could’ve been fun. If Ice Road: Vengeance had leaned into its silliness—gone full Fast & Furious with the bus, or made Neeson a self-aware old man out of his depth—it might’ve worked. But instead, it plays everything deadly serious. And that just doesn’t work when your movie hinges on a senior citizen scaling Everest while dodging gunfire.
End of the Road?
There’s a moment late in the film when the ragtag group—professors, teens, tour guides, and all—pick up weapons and join the fight. It’s one of those “everyone’s an action hero now” beats that’s supposed to feel empowering, but instead feels like parody. The absurdity isn’t earned. It just feels lazy, like the writers ran out of ideas and decided to throw everyone into a third-act shootout.
By the end, you’re left wondering what exactly the point of this sequel was. It doesn’t deepen Mike McCann’s character. It doesn’t revisit the elements that made The Ice Road interesting. It doesn’t even really feel like part of the same world. It’s just another VOD-tier action flick, one more notch on the belt of Neeson’s late-stage career, which increasingly feels like a long, slow shuffle through copy-paste scripts.
The irony is that Neeson is still capable of greatness. When paired with the right director (like Jaume Collet-Serra in Non-Stop or Run All Night), he can elevate this material. But here, there’s nothing for him to elevate. The story is thin, the action forgettable, and the emotional beats are about as subtle as a truck horn at 3 a.m.
As The Naked Gun reboot looms on the horizon, maybe that’s exactly the jolt Neeson’s career needs—an opportunity to poke fun at this long string of grim, joyless actioners. He’s earned the right to laugh a little. And honestly, so have we.
Final Thoughts
Ice Road: Vengeance doesn’t really offer anything you haven’t already seen a dozen times in the last decade of Liam Neeson movies. It’s not unwatchably bad—it’s just uninspired. A tired story dressed up with exotic scenery, punch-up clichés, and an aging star doing what he can with what little he’s given. It’s not vengeance—it’s inertia.
If you’re a die-hard Neeson fan, you’ll probably still check it out. But if you’re looking for a solid thriller or a fresh action film, there are plenty of better roads to travel.
