When Liam Neeson’s trucker thriller The Ice Road was first announced, some wondered with more than a little concern if it might be an updated remake of the classic 1953 French thriller The Wages of Fear.
The only way to do it is with trucks, and the only way for those trucks to get there in time is to take the so-called ice roads — actual paths that have been created on frozen northern lakes and are only used in the winter months when the ice is thick enough.
There are three trucks with three wellheads as insurance, in case one or two don’t make it.
That’s compelling stuff, which is presumably also why the History Channel once had a whole TV show about the real-life people who drove real-life trucks on real-life ice roads.
As The Wages of Fear demonstrated, there’s an existential purity to such suspense: Even as we’re pulled into the stomach-turning tension of these drivers struggling to survive on this treacherous road, we feel like we’re experiencing an ineffable truth about the human condition.
Hensleigh, who notably co-wrote the Michael Bay classics The Rock and Armageddon, has a fondness for tough-guy techspeak: You can feel him grinning behind the camera as he cuts to Air Force officers and mine-safety officials talking about the impossibility of airlifting 18-foot gas wellheads and 300 feet of pipe, or to desperate roughnecks calculating atmospheric volume among 26 sets of struggling lungs, or to truckers arguing over whether a bridge built in the 1960s and rated to 75,000 pounds is safe enough to drive their overloaded vehicles over.
A narrative thread about the cause for the methane explosion, involving sinister mine operators and their devious plan to cover up their misdeeds, eventually leads to tired, sub-Seagalian action gibberish in the second half.
But it requires a surfeit of directorial style to help place such disparate elements in the same cinematic world: You have to sell not just dialogue and plot but an entire universe of attitudes and postures.