 I'm American, so I went out to my relative's cabin on July 3rd and watched the fireworks out on the lake. It was a grand old time. But on July 4th is when we actually celebrate. So instead of doing fireworks again, I opted to stay home for the night, hunker down with the wife and watch a great film on Netflix, but then decided to watch The Ice Road instead. Before I really dive into this one, I have to first apologize to some of you viewers out there for my review of the Tomorrow War. Had I known that the quality of films coming out in 2021 were the Ice Road, shit, the Tomorrow War is a 10 out of 10. I take everything back. It's a flawless film in comparison. Because dear god have things fallen. Where to begin? You know, that's kind of the question here, isn't it? It stars Liam Neeson and Lawrence Fishburne. I don't blame these two for taking on the roles, you know, they have to eat at the end of the day. And what better characters to play than good old fashioned Sulta the Earth truck drivers who are on a mission to save a bunch of guys trapped in a mine. I mean, come on, they're American heroes here. The plot is simple and straightforward. A bunch of guys get trapped inside of a diamond mine when an explosion gets set off and they only have around 30 hours of breathable air. In order to keep these guys alive until there's time to dig them out, they need to replace some sort of a coupling or piping that's going to give them breathable air. The problem is twofold. They're up in Northern Canada, it's hard to gain access to that place easily. And two, the part that is required weighs 25 tons. How are they possibly going to pull this off? They're going to call up the Ice Road Truckers. I believe this movie was inspired by the reality TV show, the Ice Road Truckers. My father-in-law watched it religiously. I saw maybe 20 minutes of it. I thought it was the stupidest shit I've ever seen in my life. So that was already enticing enough to get me to watch the movie. Now, as I'm not the target audience, I did make sure to call up my father-in-law before I put this review out to see what he had to say. And the only word he threw out was stupid. He didn't like this movie at all. So my criticisms are just here. They're fair and they speak to an all-encompassing audience, to Ice Road enthusiasts and cinephiles alike. Speaking of moviemaking, this is a first for the director who has previously written films like Armageddon, but never really been behind the lens of a camera. And you can tell. It looks awful. Cards on the table. I watched this movie as a joke. I knew it was going to be bad. I saw the title. That was all I needed. Didn't watch a trailer. There's always a part of me, though, that is hoping I'm going to be impressed and blown away by a movie. It's just going to come out of nowhere and be like, oh yeah, you were expecting something bad, huh? Well, we just blew your mind. This is amazing. One of the positives I'll give this movie right out of the gates is it truly makes me appreciate a good filmmaker. There are so many shots in this that are just done so against the books of how you're supposed to set up a shot. Like for instance, when we're first introduced to Lawrence Fishburne's character, he's underneath of his rig with the flashlight kind of just checking things out, you know, doing his spot checks and whatnot. And he talks to one of his subordinates who comes over and tells him the mission they need to go on. And the camera just jumps between two static shots. One is looking down on Fishburne and the other is looking up at this other guy. Now a competent director would look at this scene and they would say, Fishburne is the dominant player here. He's the boss. The framing of the camera should be in a stoic way or in a way that lets the audience know that he's an intimidating character. He's a character that we should respect and listen to. And it should also show that he is in charge of this situation. But instead, we're looking down on him the whole time. So we feel like we're empowered here. We're better than this guy. And this guy is cowering to the dude above. Like, it's just so horribly set up. And that's just one instance. The whole movie has this very, very cheap kind of high school college filmmaking thing going on. I do remember making low budget crappy movies with my friends, basically for nothing. And I had two cameras. So I would just, you know, like do the one static shot and the other one I would kind of be flexible with and move around. And I look back on those movies and they're very similar to how this was set up. I'm not complimenting myself here. I'm putting down this director because he's filming the same way I did when I was 16. Who cares about the filmmaking, Adam? We're here to see big rigs drive across ice and get in scary situations. I don't know what the term is for a guy that appreciates semi trucks. I'm not discrediting you in the slightest. Everybody has their hobbies. I have plenty of dumb ones myself. I don't think you're going to like this movie though, if you are looking for realism or if you, you know, want to see cool trucks do cool things. Because anytime an event takes place in the film, it's really, really bad CG work going on and really bad camera shots. So you don't get the good filmmaking. You don't get the semi porn. How's the acting? Oh, it's bad. It's bad. Liam Neeson is just putting in the bare minimum here. Fishburne has so little to do. It's just stupid. And the actress, no idea who she is, a new up and comer, horrible. Just horrible. And I don't totally blame her. The dialogue she's given is insulting at best. The scene direction is so comically bad. There's a point in the film where one of the characters dies. Spoiler, someone dies in this. There's a whole cliche scene where he's getting pulled into the water and he's like, just let me go. Just let me go. Because there's just no way for him to get out at this moment. And it's over so fast. You don't even have a second to process it. And he's never mentioned again. No one talks about this guy. And they don't even shed a tear or really even any sort of remorse. And he was a good dude. They're just like, eh. This is what happens on the ice, baby. We're all emotionless because we know the job here. Oh, and if you weren't sure if this type of industry is dangerous, they make sure to tell you about 50 times in it. At one point, the semis flip over on their sides, each carrying 25 ton pieces of equipment. And I'm like, well, this is game over. How are they possibly going to get these things, you know, to the destination in time? They have 30 hours. They've already been driving for over a day. I mean, this is game over, man. No, not at all. Well, Liam Neeson grabs a couple chains and they just kind of pull the semi-trucks up. I really don't know how they did it. You have 25 tons each plus the weight of the semi-trucks. I don't know how you pull them up like this with a winch. That's going to pull that much weight. That seems very, very farfetched, especially on ice that was already cracking under the weight of one of these things. Now you have two of them. They said something about weight displacement. I don't think the science is sound in the slightest here. That scene was cool, though, where the ice was breaking. It's like behind them and you get these underwater shots looking up through the ice of the trucks. It looks so fakie. I loved it. It was so good because it was so bad. The Ice Road film has a lot to say, though. This isn't a film just about saving some minors or about corporate greed and bad guys. No, no, no, no, no. This tackles the opiate crisis. We have racism in this. We have PTSD. It's got every flavor under the sun for you to think about. This is a deep film. It's complex. Everything is on the Ice Road, baby. The music in this? Holy shit, it's intense. These guys could just be driving down the side of the road and the music is just all in. Liam Neeson is adjusting his mirror. They do a close-up shot of the gauge at 60 miles an hour. Their little dashboard bobbleheads are going. Easily, my favorite scene in the movie is when Liam Neeson and friends drop a bad guy off the side of a cliff in his truck. He rolls about a thousand times to the bottom. Of course, he's not dead. We know he's not dead. He's dead and out of that alive. Unscathed, as a matter of fact, zero scratches, zero bruises. He's perfectly fine. Not even a limp. He commandeers a nearby snowmobile, grabs a bunch of explosives he had on him, and hauls ass up to the top of this mountain, lays out the sticks of TNT, detonates them all within the course of like five minutes. This causes an avalanche to come down the hill. Meanwhile, our crew down below sees this coming and Liam Neeson is like, we got to book it. We can outrun this thing. And the woman's like, are you crazy? We can outrun that. She was right. They start to book it. While the ugliest CG avalanche I've ever seen starts to unfold on them, it's amazing. And as I said, the girl was right because she gets taken out by the avalanche and there's like pieces of the tree thrower. Liam Neeson's just like, hang on, pulls it out. She's fine. She's perfectly fine. You know, come to think of it, this was the perfect 4th of July film to watch. These guys are about as American as it gets. At one point, Liam Neeson falls under the water, frigid ice, gets out. All it takes to heat him back up to room temp is to just throw on the heater. These semi-trucks are awesome. I was going to give this one out of 10 opiates, but now that I think about the context of everything, it being the 4th of July, having Liam Neeson and Lawrence Fish doing their best, I think this is easily a 12 out of 10 opiate. This movie is a touchstone cinematic classic that everybody should watch, and not me. And I definitely didn't have to fast forward the last 25 minutes of the film because I hated myself so much for wasting my life away on it. Hope you liked the review. Special shout out to Netflix for constantly ruining my afternoon. If you liked the video, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to Adam Does Movies. I do a lot of these Adam Rantz videos along with my flagship show Movie Feuds that I've brought back recently. You can also find me on my second channel, Adam Olinger. 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