The Ice Road (2021)

The Ice Road is a film about driving trucks across frozen water, and it commits to that premise with a stubbornness that approaches integrity. A diamond mine collapses in northern Manitoba, twenty-six men are trapped, and a rescue convoy hauls wellheads over ice that groans and cracks beneath them. The villains are corporate: Katka, the mine's owner, and Varnay, its insurance actuary, who calculates that dead miners cost less than a saved mine. That is as close as the screenplay comes to a thesis, and it delivers the argument with dynamite and a truck going off a cliff, not a speech. Liam Neeson glowers. The ice does the rest.

The cast includes Amber Midthunder as Tantoo, a young Indigenous woman whose brother is among the trapped, and Martin Sensmeier as the brother himself. They are simply present in a Manitoba story, which is honest enough, and nobody asks them to explain their heritage to the audience. Gurty, Mike's brother, is an Iraq War veteran with PTSD and aphasia, and the film treats him with a gentleness that amounts to its only firm moral position; the opening act turns on Mike breaking a man's nose for mocking him. Tantoo is competent, then becomes a mechanic. The film makes no argument about gender and seems relieved not to.

What is missing is instructive. No romance, no environmental sermon despite all that groaning ice, no revisionist history, no body-image messaging. There is faint moralizing about the mining company, delivered through a villain who gets knocked unconscious and driven into a lake. The result is a machine for moving trucks, running on diesel and predictability. A 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes seems generous. The ice road does not care, and neither, ultimately, does the film.