'The Ice Road' Trailer: It's Basically 'Armageddon' On Ice, Starring Liam Neeson

By Ben Pearson/May 18, 2021 2:00 pm EST

Liam Neeson movie characters have faced some pretty extreme challenges over the past decade or so: a missing daughter, surviving a plane crash, releasing the Kraken, fighting aliens on a battleship, and stopping bad guys on various forms of transportation, including a plane, a train, and a snow plow. Now he's facing off against the only foe that he may be able to beat temporarily, but that is sure to get the best of him in the end: time.

In The Ice Road, Neeson plays a big rig driver who has experience driving on the dangerous icy roads of Canada. When a mine collapses and the trapped workers running out of time, Neeson and co-star Laurence Fishburne have to put a team of specialists together to traverse that treacherous terrain and save the day. So yeah, it's essentially Neeson doing a riff on Armageddon – and this project hails from one of the writers of that movie, so it feels like more than just a coincidence.

The Ice Road Trailer

Jonathan Hensleigh wrote and directed this icy action thriller, which should appeal to the wide swath of Neeson-loving dads out there as well as the folks who have seen every episode of the reality TV series Ice Road Truckers. And yes, Hensleigh is one of the credited writers of Armageddon, alongside names like Robert Roy Pool (Outbreak), Shane Salerno (the upcoming Avatar sequels), Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy), and some guy named J.J. Abrams. But he also wrote the famous spec script Simon Says, which was eventually made as Die Hard with a Vengeance, and wrote the scripts for Jumanji and the Nic Cage film Next, while writing and directing Kill the Irishman and the 2004 adaptation of The Punisher, which starred Thomas Jane in the lead role.

Netflix has Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), Amber Midthunder (Legion), and Marcus Thomas (Drowning Mona) listed as additional cast members, but IMDb says Holt McCallany (Mindhunter, Lights Out) is also on board, so I'm curious to see if that ends up being true.

Here is the film's official synopsis:

After a remote diamond mine collapses in far northern Canada, a 'big-rig' ice road driver (Neeson) must lead an impossible rescue mission over a frozen ocean to save the trapped miners. Contending with thawing waters and a massive storm, they discover the real threat is one they never saw coming.

The Ice Road will be available to stream on Netflix starting June 25, 2021.