Ice Road: Vengeance

With Ice Road: Vengeance, director Jonathan Hensleigh doubles down on the archetype that has carried so many recent action films, while discreetly attempting to introduce a more elegiac touch to the machine. The premise is sober and sad: Mike McCann returns, played once again by Liam Neeson, now defined not by the treacherous ice of Manitoba, but by absence, transporting the ashes of his brother Gurty—again present in blurry flashbacks via Marcus Thomas—to Mount Everest to keep a promise. The first striking image of the journey is not a waterfall, but a clumsy human indignity: Mike transfers the contents of the urn into a TSA-approved container in an airport toilet, murmuring apologies in the white noise of the cubicle. It's a small, almost comical moment, which could be described as veristic black humor, but which captures the film's best instinct: grief as a series of thankless tasks that persist, regardless of the hero's stoicism or the height of the mountain. When Mike lands in Kathmandu, the film trades frozen lakes for the dizzying switchbacks of the Himalayas, and its tonal ambition becomes clear: a pilgrimage diverted from its axis to become a siege film, a road thriller in which the “road” is the edge of a cliff and “revenge” is less a mission than a reflexive stance against the rot of opportunism.

The film's setting is its most formidable weapon, and Hensleigh knows it. The road to the Nepalese sky is not presented as an exotic postcard, but as a technical challenge: cornices without guardrails, hairpin turns that seem hand-drawn, and gradients that seem to suck you in. Behind the camera, Tom Stern favors cramped interiors and heat haze that accentuate the characters' proximity to steel and rock; when the frame opens up, it's often to show how little road is left. The choice to set much of the action inside the Kiwi Express tour bus is both clever and constraining. On the clever side, it creates a sense of sweaty immediacy: fights between handrails and seat backs, a diesel clatter that becomes a metronome for panic, and a brilliant sequence that literalizes the film's DNA, like a crane that turns the crossing of a gorge into a contest of wills. On the restrictive side, the visual effects don't always keep pace: rocks float, sparks flash at rehearsal speed, and the digital slush that references the franchise's icy origins only serves to highlight how little ice remains. Still, the geography puts your nerves to the test, and when the bus skids toward oblivion, your palms register what your eyes refuse to believe.

If the terrain offers altitude, the characters offer traction. Dhani Yangchen, played by Fan Bingbing, arrives as a professional guide and quickly proves to be the moral and kinetic linchpin of the film: precise in close combat, steady when the narrative calls for hysteria, and quietly humorous as she teaches a gruff teenager to turn his fear into posture and his posture into action. It's a development that echoes the dynamic of the first film with Amber Midthunder, but Fan Bingbing plays her role in a clearer and more assertive manner, offering Liam Neeson a partner rather than a rival. Around them, the passengers sketch out a representative sample of anxieties and intentions: an American academic, played by Bernard Curry, who spots the region's political flaws before anyone else; his daughter, played by Grace O'Sullivan, introduced as a young girl who rolls her eyes with her headphones on, then rewritten by circumstances; the cheerful Australian driver Spike, played by Geoff Morrell, whose chatter masks the fatalism of someone who knows every blind turn by heart. On the other side of the gorge, Rudra Yash, played by Mahesh Jadu, embodies the cold logic of the real estate developer, who turns villages into spreadsheets and people into obstacles. The film briefly flirts with a more pronounced ethical dimension when the bus becomes a buffer between a landowning family and a privatized idea of progress. There is even a sense of belonging to a place that fits in with the strange truths of the production: entire sequences were shot in Australia, with Walhalla being redesigned to resemble the Himalayas, a displacement typical of the world of cinema that reflects the difficult displacements of history.

But it is at the connective tissue level that Ice Road: Vengeance alternates between excess and insufficiency. The flashbacks to Gurty are supposed to pepper the action with pain; too often they play like a layer of digital Vaseline, softening edges that should be sharp. The characters' psychology is sorted to serve the narrative: a catastrophic loss elicits a flutter, not a chapter; a spoiled teenager becomes competent after a single lesson; a funeral urn serves as both a MacGuffin and an improvised club. You sense that the film hesitates between two honest paths: leaning into the inherent ridiculousness of an action movie on a tour bus or delving into the melancholy of a man honoring a promise at high altitude. This hesitation results in a flatter middle section, with passages of talking and tinkering (repairing the radiator, rethreading the winch, negotiating the next turn) that are meant to focus on the process but mostly slow down the momentum. Even the title's promise is only half fulfilled: there is revenge, but little else that really takes this idea into account; as for the ice roads, they are nothing more than a ghostly brand, mentioned only to prevent the franchise's architecture from collapsing. The irony is that when the film loosens its grip—letting the bus skid into negative space or playing cat and mouse on the arm of a crane—it achieves a pulp, B-movie clarity that the rest of the film rarely reaches.

What keeps the engine from stalling is Liam Neeson himself, an actor capable of lending dignity to a cliché simply by standing in a doorway and remembering to breathe. He moves differently now—economy over flourish, weight over speed—and this deceleration humanizes the bravado. Watch his gaze when someone calls him an American, or when he takes the wheel because there's no one else to entrust it to: the film finds its truth not in monologues, but in the consequences of decisions. It's also telling that the best comic moment comes from him—the transfer of ashes in the toilet—because it acknowledges the inherent absurdity of grief without ridiculing it. Vengeance won't convert those who dislike Neeson, and it won't silence those who see the tenuous link between the two films as a branding strategy disguised as narrative continuity. But within its rickety scaffolding, there are moments—some painted with diesel paint and rock dust, others in the simple ritual of keeping a promise—where the film deserves the calm it rarely allows itself. In these moments, suspended between falling and fleeing, we glimpse the best film that Vengeance strives to be: no greater than its predecessor, no more chilling, just more honest about the price of continuing to live when the person you loved most has finally, irrevocably, become a burden.

Ice Road: Vengeance
Written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh
Produced by Lee Nelson, David Tish, Eugene Musso, Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein, Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt, Jonathan Hensleigh
Starring Liam Neeson, Fan Bingbing, Bernard Curry, Salim Fayad, Geoff Morrell
Cinematography: Tom Stern
Edited by Luke Doolan
Music by Michael Yezerski
Production companies: CODE Entertainment, ShivHans Pictures, Envision Media Arts
Distributed by Vertical (United States), Prime Video (France)
Release date: June 27, 2025 (United States), September 3, 2025 (France)
Running time: 113 minutes

Viewed on September 3, 2025 on Prime Video

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