I have watched this so that you don’t have to.

Ice Road: Vengeance is one of those films that once upon a time would have been on the shelves of Blockbuster as you quizzically looked at the box, trying to remember whether you could recall the film’s cinema release. You couldn’t, because it didn’t get one.

In later years, it would have been a direct-to-DVD release, appearing on shelves of your local HMV or supermarket with a cover that made it look amazing.

Today, it ends up on Prime Video.

Recently, Amazon spoke about releasing 14 movies a year to cinemas, but this was never likely to make the cut (although it seemingly did get a limited US cinema release. I can’t think why). Instead, it arrives largely unheralded on the streaming platform in time for the weekend. (Note: it seems to be on Netflix in the US).

Ice Road: Vengeance is a sequel to 2021’s The Ice Road. In that earlier film, which was “influenced” significantly by The Wages of Fear, Liam Neeson led a decent cast that included Laurence Fishburne and Holt McCallany, in a hammy film made by someone who’d seen the similarly named Discovery series, with Neeson playing a trucker. Don’t confuse this film for similarly cold-set Neeson movies like Cold Pursuit. Also bad.

This film sees Neeson’s character now mourning the loss of his brother and deciding to head to Mount Everest to scatter his ashes. We get some atrocious flashback sequences that include horrible expositional dialogue to remind viewers that the pair are brothers – when was the last time you spoke to your own sibling and used “brother” or “bro” in a sentence? It’s just clunky screenwriting.

So off Neeson goes to Kathmandu, where he meets Fan Bingbing’s Dhani, his Sherpa to take him to Everest Base Camp. Fan is seemingly still in rehabilitation mode after a big tax evasion scandal in China which curtailed her career, and I’m not sure this film is going to do much to revive it. To get around not really looking Nepali, she’s given a Malaysian parent, but she’s not alone in this skewed version of Nepal.

Near enough the entire film is set in Nepal, but where was this film shot? Victoria, Australia. There were at least second units in both Nepal and India, but I’m not sure if any of the main cast went close to either place. We see a car driving through what could easily me Kathmandu, and then a very obvious green-screen of a conversation taking place inside that car. You can very much tell that most of the film was not shot in Nepal, even if it doesn’t shout Australia either

Most of the rest of the cast are Australian nationals playing either tourists or locals – many have Neighbours on their CVs. But they are given some truly terrible dialogue and atrocious directing, so they have very little to work with.

Given that Neeson’s character is a trucker, the plot needed to get him into some kind of a vehicle, and that comes in the form of a bus that will somehow drive from Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp. Now, I’ve not visited Nepal, but even I know you can’t just “drive” to Everest Base Camp in Nepal which is at 5,300m. Yes, there are some roads that go that high in China and India, including to the base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain. But on the Nepali side, you have to hike in along a route that takes quite a few days (or at least helicopter in). I’m pretty sure there aren’t massive road signs in Nepal that say “Mt Everest” as we see here.

Nevertheless, that’s where the bus is going, filled with some snowboarders who are apparently going to snowboard down Everest, a stroppy teenage girl and her dad, and a handful of others, most of whom leave in fairly short order.

But we’ve already seen the bad guys do their first dastardly deed, driving a bus off a mountain pass to kill a man who might otherwise block the bad guys building a dam. The whole premise of bumping off all the members of a family to build a dam makes little sense in the context of the film. But we need bad guys, and they’re going to do what bad guys in all movies do.

Except, that when the bus gets pushed off the mountain, it’s some of worst visual effects I’ve seen for ages. There is literally no physics at play, and the sequence is risible. This quickly becomes a theme of the film, when the production team bites off far more than their minimal vfx budget allows for. There is a truly hilarious sequence of a rockfall over a tunnel, with the bus racing to enter the tunnel before the rocks land on the ground blocking the entrance, and it’s awful.

Liam Neeson is 73 years old, so he’s not quite as good as he maybe once was at performing the various action scenes. We have him rock climbing at the beginning, with some of the most blatantly obvious stunt performers doubling for him. We’re close to Roger Moore territory when he was “skiing” in Bond films. Then there are numerous fight scenes on the bus. Neeson takes quite a lot of blows here, but sadly Fan’s character isn’t quite as kickass as the producers probably hoped, and the fights are just anaemic. Only the female bad guy is any good, and she’s an hilarious caricature.

The Australian locations don’t really convince, even with some decent matting in of mountains. And the “ice road” of the title is a single over-extended sequence where the road is a bit cold and the bus has to be lowered down a steep slope.

Various chase scenes are badly directed, with the problem being that chasing an old bus with Toyotas and Range Rovers is not an equal contest. Buses just don’t go fast. They are, however, seemingly completely bullet-proof based on my watching of this film. So that’s handy if you need to have a teenager firing a shot gun out the window, just minutes after her dad was mercilessly gunned down. She also gets taught a killer martial art move in about the same amount of time as it took Neo to learn kung fu in The Matrix.

Characters die in quick succession here, often for little real purpose. It’s just an obvious need to thin out the cast and make us want “vengeance”. There’s a sequence involving a crane which makes little sense. You need someone to operate the crane and they must always be left on the other side of the ravine.

But I can’t not talk some more about the visual effects. Another truly awful sequence is the penultimate fight on the bus. At the end, two bad guys fall off a cliff in almost an afterthought. It’s like “my first After Effects” sequence.

And mostly, this is just so badly directed and edited. Yes – you had a limited budget. But the fights are poorly choreographed, badly edited together and just don’t feel kinetic. This film is a reminder that good action is actually really hard to do.

I’m not sure why I’ve written 1000 words on one of the worst films I’ll see this year, but it was cathartic to do so.