'The Ice Road' review: Liam Neeson's latest action film is a dud

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Stop me if you've heard this before: Liam Neeson stars in an action movie as a loner seeking revenge against the forces that have wronged him and a family member.

In the ongoing game of Mad Libs that constitutes Neeson's career in the genre, this time he's a truck driver named Mike, hired along with his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas) to join a team assembled by Laurence Fishburne's Goldenrod.

They're on a rescue mission to drive rigs with wellheads across dangerous ice roads to a diamond mine in northern Manitoba, Canada, where about two dozen miners have been trapped following a methane explosion.

The betrayal component arrives when it becomes apparent that the mining company might not actually want the mission to succeed.

MY SAY It's been more than a decade since Neeson launched his career renaissance with "Taken," transforming from an actor involved in a range of projects across genres into primarily an action-thriller star.

That means we're past the point of speculating about why such an accomplished actor seems to feel an almost single-minded drive toward making films that require him to snarl, grimace, make glum pronouncements and beat up bad guys.

There's no question that he's very good at this, and that his presence in even the silliest of movies immediately lends an element of gravitas that counterparts such as Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage can't be depended upon to provide.

But at one point in "The Ice Road," writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh ("Armageddon") asks this magnificent actor to draw on every bit of his charismatic depth to utter the following line of dialogue: "Gurty's like that commercial; takes a lickin', but keeps on tickin'."

There is no one who could be handed dialogue like that and make it into anything but a ridiculous joke. You could combine Daniel Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep and Denzel Washington into one mega-actor and even that hybrid superstar would have no idea what to do with such a line.

So it's not surprising that Neeson has turned up in a lousy thriller that, were it not on Netflix, might be destined for the bottom of a DVD display at the back of a Target. It's also not his fault that the movie stinks.

For that, blame a plot that piles cliches atop cliches with an end result of mush — not content to be the story of a dramatic rescue, it's also a conspiracy movie and a revenge story.

Add to it the total absence of a sense of humor. Finish it off with action scenes filled with characters doing things that make absolutely no sense — you can be impaled with a tree in the world of "The Ice Road" and still be absolutely fine — and you're left with a total dud.

BOTTOM LINE There are many better Liam Neeson action movies.