Movie Review: ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 11th, 2025 / 02:04 AM

ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE movie poster | ©2025 Vertical Entertainment

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Liam Neeson, Fan Bingbing, Marcus Thomas, Grace O’Sullivan, Saksham Sharma, Bernard Curry, Geoff Morrell, Mahesh Jadu, Amelia Bishop, Shapoor Batliwalla, Monish Anand
Writer: Jonathan Hensleigh
Director: Jonathan Hensleigh
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Release Date: June 27, 2025 (theatrical), July 1, 2025 (VOD)

ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE is a sequel to 2021’s THE ICE ROAD. Both films are written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh, and both are action thrillers starring Liam Neeson as long-haul trucker Mike McCann.

In the first ICE ROAD, Mike and his beloved younger brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) find themselves to be pawns in a complicated, deadly mining scheme. They save a lot of trapped miners, but Gurty is killed in the process. Mike wreaks lethal havoc on a bunch of hench-people, though he is only able to deliver a punch in the nose to the person ultimately responsible (presumably, the guy will be going to jail, or at least tangled up in court, for the rest of his life).

In ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE, Mike goes to Kathmandu, Nepal (where part of the movie was in fact filmed) to follow Gurdy’s written instructions to scatter his ashes on Everest, which the brothers had once hoped to climb together.

This time, Mike isn’t even so much a pawn as an innocent bystander caught up in the escalation of a land war. Gangster businessman Rudra Yash (Mahesh Jadu) wants to build a profitable hydro-electric dam where a Nepalese mountain village now exists. The primary landowners, the Rai family, refuse to sell.

Thus it is that Mike and his super-capable mountain guide, Dhani Yangchen, are on a bus heading up Everest with young Vijay Rai (Saksham Sharma) when a kidnapping is attempted. Things escalate from there, with natural disasters, mechanical failures and human malice in the mix together.

By now, Neeson’s presence in a movie of this genre – he really does have a very particular set of skills when it comes to these things – indicates certain developments are going to happen, and so they do. It’s easy to understand why Neeson keeps getting cast in these films. He’s got complete conviction and the physical frame to let us accept that he’s still capable of holding his own in a physical brawl, to say nothing of handling a big rig or a big gun.

Fan, a martial arts star, makes Dhani someone we would love to have in our corner and Shapoor Batliwalla makes a strong impression as the Rai patriarch. Sharma is good as the youth forced to mature in a hurry in the face of calamity.

With narrow, steep mountain roads, filmmaker Hensleigh ably creates suspense, especially for those viewers who suffer from acrophobia or are just generally alarmed at the site of all those steep drops with no guardrails.

There are a few oddities with ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE, starting with the fact that there’s not much of either title element. While we see the majestic snow-covered Himalayas towering in the background, the roads and fields are rocky, dusty, and dry.

It’s unlikely that this specific discrepancy is likely to deter viewers (“I wanted a movie with icy roads, dammit!” is not a complaint often heard). The “vengeance” part is applied sparingly – it’s not that our heroes don’t want to avenge their losses, but in practical terms, most of the damage they inflict is in the course of self-preservation.

A slightly more noticeable issue is that one character, after having suffered unexpected traumatic loss, behaves much the same before and after. It’s unclear if this is due to the performer or to the direction, but it’s distracting.

Otherwise, ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE is a sturdy action vehicle (pardon the pun) with expert leads and some breathtaking scenery.

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