WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Ice Road, now streaming on Netflix.
While most of Hollywood currently is engrossed in F9 and how Team Toretto continues to defy the odds — and physics — against terrorists, Liam Neeson delivers his own high-octane brand of justice in The Ice Road. He portrays a bitter trucker, Mike, trying to get rescue equipment to Manitoba to save trapped miners, only for the cracking road and a secret saboteur to endanger the mission. However, as the second half kicks into gear, The Ice Road turns into a Fast & Furious film.
When Benjamin Walker’s Varnay betrays the team, he locks Mike and his brother, Gurty, in a rig before heading off with Tantoo’s truck to fake an accident. He turns out to be a sinister company man, hoping the miners will die so Katka’s secrets about bad work practices are kept safe.
But Mike and Gurty use heavy equipment to bust their way out and escape a dynamite blast, throwing nods to heroes such as Dom and even the Rock’s Hobbs. As they pull their truck back on the road, however, this is where they really show their chops, speeding to catch Varnay’s rig and steal their equipment back.
Varnay keeps upping the stakes, even after Mike’s truck pushes him off a cliff in a van, which suggests he’s dead. That isn’t the case, though, because Varnay slips out of the crash, jumps on a snowmobile and plants some explosives to create an avalanche. It leaves Mike and Gurty in one truck and Tantoo in another, outracing an avalanche in a move that’d make Dom’s crew proud.
Unfortunately, Tantoo’s rig gets damaged, but even though she’s gets impaled by debris, she exhibits the same ‘superhuman’ traits Dom’s racers have when it comes to injuries. Mike rescues her, hooks her cabin with the equipment to his truck and speeds off to the mine. But Varnay’s as resilient and resourceful as ever, jacking the downed truck Tantoo left behind and racing to catch his enemies. This leads to the rigs driving side by side, with Varnay raging as he tries to shoot at Mike. It harkens back to earlier scenes, when his goons were hanging off the trucks in a sequence akin to the heists in the first Fast & Furious film.
Mike then decides to evoke his inner Paul Walker by jumping onto Varnay’s rig, infiltrating and commandeering it. Varnay follows suit, magically traversing the truck, hanging off the edges but as he’s about to make his big move, Mike leaps out and sends the rig crashing into a hole in the ice to kill Varnay at last.
This creates a finale that also has the ingredients of a Fast & Furious film, as Tantoo sneaks her rig across a falling bridge while Gurty sacrifices himself to allow it not to drop off. It’s a lot of drama and cheesy one-liners as she and Mike finally get to the mine. The Ice Road then wraps on something that forms the main DNA of Vin Diesel’s franchise: family, as Tantoo’s brother emerges from the mine, having been being rescued, and Mike honors his brother’s death in the epilogue.
Starring Liam Neeson, Marcus Thomas, Amber Midthunder, Benjamin Walker, Holt McCallany and Laurence Fishburne, The Ice Road is now streaming on Netflix.
Directed by Justin Lin, F9 stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, John Cena, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jordana Brewster, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell and Charlize Theron. The film is in theaters now.
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