Ice Road: Vengeance (2025)

Preceded by: The Ice Road (2021)

	Directed by: Jonathan Hensleigh	COUNTRY USA GENRE Action/Thriller NORWEGIAN TITLE Ice Road: Vengeance RUNNING TIME 114 minutes
	Produced by: Lee Nelson David Tish Eugene Musso Shivani Rawat Julie Goldstein Al Corley Bart Rosenblatt Jonathan Hensleigh
	Written by: Jonathan Hensleigh

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Mike McCann	Liam Neeson
Dhani Yangchen	Fan Bingbing
Professor Myers	Bernard Curry	½
Spike	Geoff Morrell	½
Rudra Yash	Mahesh Jadu	½
Jorgo	Salim Fayad	½
Vijay Rai	Saksham Sharma	½
Starr Myers	Grace O'Sullivan

Review

In name, a sequel to The Ice Road (2021), made by the same production team, although Ice Road: Vengeance is fashioned as a freestanding, independent film – except the title, of course, which makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, there's a lot more in this low-budget B movie that doesn't make sense, such as the location choices, the arbitrary ethnicities of the cast, or the 72-year-old action hero. The silly plot has Liam Neeson travelling to scatter his brother's ashes in Nepal, where he gets entangled in some local culture war and power struggle over the construction of a dam, which quickly turns into a parodic mishmash of MacGyverism and preservationist warfare. Now, Liam is a fit man, but at his age, this still becomes ridiculous. His sluggish movements and diction belong somewhere else than in split-second gunfights or free soloing up rock faces. Not even Clint clung to his action-hero persona this long. Still, Neeson is not the main reason Ice Road: Vengeance becomes almost unwatchable. One-dimensional villains, stereotypical supporting characters, and poorly directed drama render the shell story utterly inauthentic. And the absolute second-rate CGI effects and tedious action sequences don't help the suspension of disbelief much either. A stinker.