Time: 114 Minutes
Cast:
Liam Neeson as Mike McCann
Fan Bingbing as Dhani Yangchen
Bernard Curry as Professor Myers
Geoff Morrell as Spike
Salim Fayad as Jorgo
Director: Jonathan Hensleigh

The Ice Road was a passable Liam Neeson action flick from 2021, it wasn’t very good but I nonetheless enjoyed my time with it. Still, 5 years later I was surprised to see a sequel pop up on Prime, titled Ice Road: Vengeance. I really wasn’t expecting much from it, and while I didn’t dislike it, it was pretty much what I expected.

The Ice Road didn’t really need a sequel, and Vengeance doesn’t have a massive number of links to the original. The main aspect that carries over is that Liam Neeson’s brother died in the last movie, and so the sequel has him going up to Mount Everest before finding himself caught up in shenanigans once again. That’s it, there aren’t even that many ice roads in Vengeance. The writing and plot is lazy mindless entertainment and quite silly. While it wasn’t memorable at all, I will say that I wasn’t necessarily bored during it.

A lot of Liam Neeson’s action movies are very hit or miss, but the one consistent thing throughout all of them is that he is reliably good, and Vengeance is no exception. He is enjoyable to watch, and was the main reason that I was somewhat enjoying the movie and wasn’t bored. The rest of the acting is rather stiff and mediocre.

Jonathan Hensleigh returns from the last Ice Road movie to direct this one too, and while I don’t have the strongest memory of that first movie, I think his work here is significantly worse. It looks very cheap, and the action, while not unenjoyable, is very low budget, and there’s some really bad green screen and CGI.

Ice Road: Vengeance is an incredibly generic and forgettable action thriller and unnecessary sequel, but still has some entertaining moments.