BEFORE: Well, as long as I'm programming for winter, let's throw this one into the (wintry) mix. I've got a few Liam Neeson films to burn off this week, which should get me to a stone's throw from "Glass Onion". Martin Sensmeier carries over from "Wind River".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Cold Pursuit" (Movie #3,501)
THE PLOT: After a remote diamond mine collapses in far northern Canada, a big-rig ice road driver must lead an impossible rescue mission over a frozen lake to save the trapped miners.
AFTER: Wow, this one really could have been worse. Like, a LOT worse. It makes sense, you want to do an action movie on trucks during winter, you get the guy who starred in "Cold Pursuit", aka "Die Hard on a Snowplow". Totally get it. Last year at this time I was starting up the long Bruce Willis chain, and if you can get Bruce Willis, you get Bruce Willis. Though I guess now if you can get Bruce Willis, you get his CGI avatar, or something, he's basically retired. But it's true for Liam Neeson too, if you can get him to play a trucker then you should get him.
"Ice Road Truckers" was a thing, a show on the History Channel (for some reason) that aired from 2007 to 2017, my Dad was a religious devotée of the I.R.T., he was always watching it when I came to visit - and to think he didn't want cable TV at some point, but I bought it for him as a surprise, and man, he found his shows, all right. He's retired now, but he was a short-haul trucker in Massachusetts for most of his life, that was the family business his father started, and he ran it with his mother and brother after his father died. Trucking paid for me to go to film school, so I can't really find fault with the profession - but he was up and out most mornings before me, no breakfast, just coffee, and then when deregulation came along he got out for a while, only to re-enlist with New Penn a few years later so he could build up a pension. It's necessary but mostly thankless and back-breaking work, and I wanted no part of it - to this day if I'm feeling down about my career I can kind of think, "Well, at least I'm not driving a truck and unloading freight..." Sorry, Dad.
Anyway the point of Ice Road trucking is to drive on the frozen lakes and rivers in Canada and Alaska when the roads are filled with snow, and this is somehow both less and more dangerous - less chance of the truck getting stuck in the snow, but a greater chance of a tractor-trailer falling through the ice and sinking. Needless to say, this should only be attempted during certain calendar months, and when the weather is cold enough to be SURE that the ice can safety hold the weight of a truck. So you can probably guess that in this action film, at least one truck is going through that ice at some point. The TV show featured the dangers of cold, fatigue and ice blindness, but the MOVIE feels the need to throw in a bunch of goons with guns on snowmobiles, a couple of dynamite explosions, and some of those really cool cracking ice effects to really bump up the tension.
The plot here involves a mine in Northern Canada where a methane explosion has trapped a bunch of 26 miners, and they're rapidly running out of air. The call goes out for an emergency delivery of wellheads to cap the methane, and drills to get the miners out of there. Because wouldn't you know it, all the drills are on the INSIDE of the mine, with the miners. Wait a minute, let's think this through - there are miners trapped inside a mine, where they were drilling. Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, why can't they just drill their own way OUT, instead of somebody on the outside drilling IN? Go ahead, Mr. Screenwriter, tell me why, I'll wait....
While we wait for a response, let's discuss the rest of the plot. The call goes out for drivers to deliver the needed wellheads via the Ice Road, only it's getting a bit close to spring, and most of the drivers are done for the season. Hmm, spring means melting ice, that means taking the Ice Road is a BAD idea, could we maybe send the trucks via the highway or something? Hmmm? That's NITPICK POINT #2.
Mike McCann and his brother, Gurty, drive up from North Dakota - sure, because time is of the essence, and there's no local truck driver in Winnipeg who can do it. Gurty's a veteran with PTSD and aphasia, which causes other truckers to make fun of him, despite the fact that he can fix a truck engine faster than anyone else around - and Mike gets into fights defending him, which causes them to get fired from jobs, time and time again. But if they can deliver the materials to the mine, they'll split part of the $200,000 payoff and be able to put a deposit down on their own rig, which Gurty wants to name "Trucky McTruckFace" or something.
They set out as part of a convoy, along with a 2nd truck driven by a young Native American woman, who's got her own reasons for volunteering, the representative of the mine's insurance company, and Jim Goldenrod, who runs the only trucking company in Winnipeg, apparently. But this is a dangerous gig, don't forget, so maybe not everybody's going to make it to the drop-off. And it's an action film, so there's going to be a LOT that goes wrong along the way - in a way, this film reminded me of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", which really was just one big set of techie things going wrong after another. Well, I'll admit this does make sense, we've got heavy trucks carry bulky equipment traveling on thin ice, yeah, something's sort of bound to fail, and that's before the goons with guns on snowmobiles show up. Clearly somebody does NOT want this mission to succeed, but, umm, WHY exactly?
This is perhaps the biggest NITPICK POINT of them all, the WHY of it. If the mine was looking to reduce their workforce, there were probably easier and cheaper ways to do that. Severance pay would probably be less than paying out death benefits, I have to figure. And then when you factor in what 26 dead miners would do to their insurance premiums, it's hard to imagine WHY the mining executives would not want them to be rescued - if the logic behind their actions is here, I sure missed it.
I recognize the actor playing Varnay, the insurance company actuary. He also played a young version of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the biopic "Kinsey", where Liam Neeson played the older Kinsey. That means the two actors resembled each other, at one point, enough to play the same role - so it felt a little weird here seeing them opposite each other in the same shot. Just me?
Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "Spielberg"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen (sort of) in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Marcus Thomas (last seen in "The Forger"), Amber Midthunder (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Benjamin Walker (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Greenland"), Matt McCoy, Matt Salinger, Chad Bruce, Adam Hurtig, Bradley Sawatzky, Marshall Williams, Paul Essiembre, Arne MacPherson, Gabriel Daniels (last seen in "Goon"), Darcy Fehr, Steve Pacaud, Fady Naguib (last seen in "Candyman"), Terry Ray.
RATING: 6 out of 10 songs about driving trucks (which is apparently the only music that truck drivers are allowed to listen to)
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