Prime Video’s War of the Worldsstill stands as one of the lowest-rated moves on Rotten Tomatoes of the year — even if it has heroically pulled itself up to 4% from its humble beginnings at 0%. Perhaps the stinky legacy of that sci-fi adaptation can explain why Prime Video’s number one movie on the global streaming charts isn’t on Prime Video at all in the United States, with Amazon having sold Liam Neeson’s lousy Ice Road: Vengeanceto Netflix instead. The movie currently has just 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s hard to blame the company for not wanting to have the exclusive streaming rights to two of 2025’s worst movies.
Naturally, though, Ice Road: Vengeance is now the top movie on Netflix in the United States, proving once again that the general public’s standards are pretty low when it comes to streaming action movies with a recognizable star. Was Prime Video wrong to let Netflix have it? It’s impossible to say how much any one hit movie on a streaming platform is worth, since there’s no way to know if anyone in the world is signing up for Netflix just to watch Ice Road: Vengeance, but it seems enormously unlikely that itwill go on to become a cultural touchstone the way KPop Demon Huntershas. Or maybe we’ll look extremely silly in a few months when everyone’s going wild for the sing-a-long version of Ice Road: Vengeance.
What Is ‘Ice Road: Vengeance’?
As suggested by the title, Ice Road: Vengeance is a sequel to Neeson’s 2021 movie TheIce Road, in which he played a Liam Neeson-type character tasked with transporting equipment across a dangerous ice road in order to save some trapped miners. The sequel takes place in Nepal and doesn’t really involve ice roads at all, at least in the sense that a literal ice road is built on frozen water and is therefore a different thing than an icy road or an ice-covered road. That means the only real way to set this apart from every other Liam Neeson action movie is that he plays an ice-road truck driver in this one who doesn’t drive on any ice roads.
And while we’re talking about things that Ice Road: Vengeance is not, it’s worth pointing out that this movie and its predecessor are unrelated to the 2019 Liam Neeson action movie Cold Pursuit. In that movie, he played a snowplow driver getting vengeance for the murder of his son. They’re all also unrelated to The Grey, which took place in a cold climate, but it was about him fighting wolves. They’re all also unrelated to Neeson’s upcoming horror-comedy Cold Storage, which is also about cold temperatures, but not vengeance or trucks. And none of this has anything to do with the 2017 movie The Snowman(Mister Police, I gave you all the clues), which Liam Neeson wasn’t even in.
But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about Ice Road: Vengeance — a Prime Video exclusive that is exclusively on Netflix in the United States that also doesn’t feature ice roads — is that it hit the top spot on Netflix just a little more than a month after the theatrical release of Liam Neeson’s best movie in years: The Naked Gun. It seems like he still has the juice, in terms of performing and picking projects, he just needs to utilize it more often. Then again, this is the top movie on whichever streaming service it’s on, depending on where you are, so what’s stopping him from making a third Ice Road movie about driving a truck in space? Maybe we all need to stop encouraging him.
- Release Date
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June 27, 2025
- Runtime
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113 minutes
- Director
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Jonathan Hensleigh
- Writers
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Jonathan Hensleigh
- Producers
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Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt, Eugene Musso, Lee Nelson, Shivani Rawat, David Tish
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Fan Bingbing
Dhani Yangchen
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Grace O’Sullivan
Starr Myers
