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In Praise of Liam Neeson movies



This blog confesses to finding this a very challenging time in world history - a time of threatened democracies, threatened peoples and enclaves and nations, threatened ways of being human, threatened ecosystems and indeed the planet... it is perhaps the Age of Threats, best exemplified by the excesses of billionaire capitalism, big tech, and drone warfare. It is a tough time.

So, when Liam Neeson releases a new movie, we watch it. Simply for escapism. For the idea that someone can solve some of these problems, with their skill set.

Now, critical standards are important, when one is a critic, but less so when one is a consumer of an escapeway to another world.

Liam Neeson's "violent dad" movies are not for everyone. His Taken films are admittedly the gold standard of the Neeson genre. But we love his always the same but different characters, wherever they appear, in warm or blizzard conditions, especially when they start somewhat isolated or sad, and suddenly have a job to do, that only a very tall old guy can handle. It's preposterous, though ageist to argue so. Why not let an old man do some good for a change?

Most of these films are "bad" by the standards of Vertigo. They are B films, released to video, or streaming, after brief cinema releases. Some do well, others less so. But they come out once or twice a year. And whether they are camp, kitsch or just guilty pleasures, there are enough of them now to set up a whole film season, or drinking game.

Neeson is a good actor, and his best roles, including in Schindler's List, are A-list.

But in films like Ice Road: Vengeance (now available to stream), that's not the point. He just has to throw punches and leap a bit, and speak laconically. He exudes a kind of dignity.

Now, almost every review of this film has been cruel, almost gleefully so. And it is easy to dismiss a low-budget action movie like this. But this one actually has some quality to it.

Firstly, the writer-director, Jonathan Hensleigh wrote the screenplays for Die Hard: With a Vengeance (hence the word in the new title?), Armageddon, and Jumanji - three of the top grossing films of the 1990s. His The Ice Road with Neeson did well enough on Netflix to warrant this sequel.

The plot is a Western, in all but name, perhaps ironic as the setting is Nepal, on the edge of the rising roads to The Himalayan Base Camp for Everest. Instead of a stage coach, we have a bus coach, driven by a grizzled old Kiwi (who ends up actually being left to die with a gun, to "hold 'em off at the pass").

The hero, Mike, is an Irish-American who can drive large trucks expertly on ice roads, and is a fearless tough fighter who is also a skilled mechanic. Finding himself in Nepal on the coach, heading to Base Camp so he can scatter his dead vet brother's ashes there, his guide is the wonderfully beautiful female middle-aged "Sherpa" and ex-soldier, Dhani, played by Bingbing Fan. As the film progresses, it becomes clear she is a great martial arts warrior, and can use any object to punch and defeat villains. Also onboard the coach are a group of mainly secondary characters, including a well-meaning oddly ineffectual professor who knows the region, and his Instagram-obsessed teenage daughter.

Their enemies are, basically, the cattle ranchers who want to take the land from the humble farmers - or, as in the Japanese versions of this story, the peasants. I suppose the pitch was Speed meets Shane meets Seven Samurai.

Oddly, there is little to no mountain climbing in the movie (was a scene cut? The opening shows Neeson can climb!). The villains are exceptionally handsome corrupt Nepalese police officers, a handsome Nepalese industrialist/mobster, and Amelia Bishop playing Jeet, a preposterously kickass lithe assassin ninja motorcyclist out of a Bond film. Jeet basically fights Mike and Dhani a lot, while the bus keeps careening down very steep curving icy gradients, with doom on the margins, while people machine gun them. Sometimes it feels very Mad Max: Fury Road, in a good way.

The film is absurd but not most of the time, mostly, it avoids the pitfalls of ludicrousness but we could ask how does Mike manage to jerry-rig a whole pully system to lift and repair the bus in two hours? How do they expect to get away with shooting all these police officers? 

We don't care. It's a funny, madcap romp of an adventure, with a very touching romantic ending, maybe one of the most romantic in Neeson's career. And there are some good lines, including near the end.

Good prevails. The vicious corrupt killers are defeated by the cowboys from out of town. The good farmers/villagers get to save their sacred river and generate electricity! And despite a lot of noble deaths, everyone seems happy at the end, as if it was all worth it.

It is getting one and two star reviews. It deserves three stars at least. It's entertaining. And the message is hopeful. It made me feel like I could change a big tire at high altitude fast.



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