On Screen: “Ice Road: Vengeance”
Ice Road: Vengeance
Irish actor Liam Neeson wins the versatility award this week, starring in “The Naked Gun” in theaters and “Ice Road: Vengeance,” the formulaic sequel to the 2021 action thriller as Neeson teams up once again with writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh.
This time, grief-stricken big rig driver Mike McCann (Neeson) embarks on a sad journey to honor his recently deceased younger brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas). Since they’d often talked about climbing Mount Everest together, Mike decides that’s where he’s going to scatter Gurty’s ashes.
Arriving in Nepal, Mike is met by an experienced mountain guide, Dhani Yangchen (Fan Bingbing), and they board a Kathmandu tour bus — dubbed “the Kiwi Express” — to traverse the 12,000 ft. terrain of the infamous Road to the Sky en route to the base camp.
Their garrulous Australian driver Spike (Geoff Morrell) knows the route well and cheerily greets them along with other trekkers, including American human rights professor Myers (Bernard Curry) with his unenthusiastic, cellphone-addicted teenage daughter Starr (Grace O’Sullivan).
Problem is: a group of nasty kidnappers jump aboard. They’re after a local resident, Vijay Rai (Saksham Sharma), whose prominent Nepalese family is stubbornly holding on to their ancestral land on which corrupt politicians want to build a huge hydroelectric dam that would destroy a nearby village.
When the bad guys try to hijack the tour bus, fighting erupts and Spike is injured, meaning Mike must take the wheel, careening around treacherous mountain curves to reach the Annapurna Highlands where Vijay’s grandfather is hiding.
While Chinese star Fan Bingbing is a fierce kickass foil for grizzled Neeson, this isn’t really a sequel — and the high touted ice is in short supply, even in the Himalayas.
FYI: Much filming took place in Walhalla, Australia, with the town disguised to look Nepalese.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Ice Road: Vengeance” skids in with a slippery, if forgettable 5, available to rent on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.