ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE - Mark Reviews Movies

Ice Road: Vengeance, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 26, 2025

As is so often the case with that release plan, The Ice Road came and was quickly forgotten (not to mention hidden from critics beforehand, in case anyone wonders where that review is) on a certain subscription streaming platform. That might have been for the best, but it's still not exactly fair, even to a disposable and silly thriller like it.

Meanwhile, Ice Road: Vengeance is receiving a theatrical release (and wasn't hidden from critics beforehand), and one wonders how much of writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh's experience with that streaming platform determined the course of this sequel. It doesn't even feel like a direct follow-up to its 2021 predecessor, with the most notable exclusion being the type of road mentioned in the title. This one stands on its own and is, like the first movie, quite silly but a bit more self-aware of that fact.

The setting makes a good amount of difference here. It's Nepal, apparently filmed by way of Australia, which would account for the absence of ice on the roads and the very digital nature of the one stretch of thoroughfare that looks very slushy. There's something far more frightening about the mountainous paths and high-up action here than the stark chill of the previous movie, and Hensleigh takes advantage of such locales in a couple of sequences that certainly make this entry more palatable.

Still, it is a sequel, in that Liam Neeson's professional trucker Mike McCann returns, following the completely ignored events of his last adventure. The premise of this one has Mike traveling to Nepal to scatter the ashes of his dead brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) on Mount Everest. Some may recall that Gurty was a major character in the original movie, but by way of flashbacks, Hensleigh essentially gives the character and his relationship with Mike a different dynamic and lets those stand on their own, without any mention of what happened in the first installment.

This is a smart decision (and possibly a passive-aggressive one toward the predecessor's distributor), because it throws Mike into new territory, both literally and figuratively, as well. After Gurty's demise, Mike basically has an unspoken and unacknowledged death wish, climbing a rock face in the opening scene and discarding a safety line for the last stretch of the ascent. Even if Hensleigh dismisses that idea as soon as Mike lands in Kathmandu (as well as any grief or remorse or guilt that arises later in the story for other characters), it's a fine start and at least some explanation for why Mike throws himself so willingly into danger yet again.

That danger comes while Mike, joined by local Everest guide Dhani (Fan Bingbing), is on a tour bus heading to the mountain's base camp. It's overtaken by kidnappers, looking to abduct Vijay (Saksham Sharma), the last in line of the family who founded a local village. Some corporate interest wants to build a hydroelectric dam there, but the founding family members have concerns. That's enough for some nefarious actors to push the grandfather, along with several other people, off a cliff in a bus and to coerce Vijay to lead them to his father (played by Shapoor Batliwalla) in order to kill the remaining members of the influential clan.

The setup, of course, is primarily an excuse for a string of fights, chases, and scenes of driving-based peril. The last parts are the most effective bits, featuring Mike trying to navigate the diesel tour bus down a steep slope with hairpin curves, across the narrow ledge of a mountainside road, and, in the most ambitious bit of action, over a gorge by way of a crane. The visual effects aren't always convincing, such as how every look at that sharp decline makes the road appear as phony as the bus on some of those turns. However, the business with the crane, clearly not transporting anything or anyone over a deep ravine, is staged with some intentionally amusing dynamics, as it becomes a back-and-forth fight over control of the industrial equipment. The setup of that sequence is theoretically dizzying enough, what with the gorge, without the participants being suddenly jarred in different directions, too.

As for the rest of the action, it's too generic compared to those setpieces, with each of the surviving bus passengers taking on assorted foes one-on-one (They clear out most of the bus seats, which makes a convenient stage for those fights) and vehicle chases across dry deserts that really make us wonder why the filmmakers kept the title as it is. Neeson and Fan do have solid chemistry as the only two passengers with any kind of experience in these sorts of things, although the humor and sense of fun come across as dissonant when everyone is dealing with the immediate, violent deaths of friends and loved ones just a bit prior.

The movie is an improvement over its predecessor, thanks to the specifics of its setting and the particulars of some of the action. To be clear, that isn't saying much about the quality of Ice Road: Vengeance, which is too bland, formulaic, and tonally inconsistent to succeed on its own terms.

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