Mark Reviews Movies: END OF THE ROAD (2022)

End of the Road, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2022

A family becomes caught up in a world of violence and corruption in End of the Road, which begins as a promising and straightforward thriller, only to quickly and continuously find ways to ruin the simple and convincing setup. The screenplay by Christopher J. Moore and David Loughery keeps throwing complications at its characters, with only a few of them actually related to the threat at hand, and at a certain point, it feels as if the plot is being made up as it goes.

For a bit, at least, the foundation of the story is generally fine. We meet Brenda (Queen Latifah, whose presence is always appreciated—and especially so when the strength of her on-screen persona can give even throwaway junk like this a solid focal point), a recently widowed mother of two. Her husband had been ill with cancer, and after going into deep debt in order to pay for his treatment, Brenda has lost the family home somewhere outside Los Angeles.

That means she, her two kids, and her younger brother Reggie (Chris Bridges) have to move out and move on to start a new life in Houston. The kids, elder daughter Kelly (Mychala Faith Lee) and younger son Cam (Shaun Dixon), aren't happy and worry about potentially being among the few Black people in their future hometown.

The setup is grounded enough that there's a legitimate story for Moore, Loughery, and director Millicent Shelton to tell about this family, dealing with immediate grief while traveling across the country toward an uncertain future. This isn't that down-to-earth movie, of course. That becomes painfully apparent when the family stops at a gas station on a detour route somewhere in Arizona, Kelly is harassed by a couple of "good ol' boys," and the two awful, racist locals chase the family's SUV, try to run them off the road, and force an apology out of Brenda.

That scene might be on-the-nose, but it establishes a certain expectation and brand of threat that Brenda and her family have to confront now and very well might have to face again in the near future. It's not the main goal here, though, and compared to the next time racism rears its ugly head in this story, this confrontation comes across as subtly and authentically menacing.

No, the bulk of the plot involves a drug deal gone wrong, as some drug runner murders his cohort in the desert for a bag of cash and ends up in the motel room next door to Brenda's family on their trip. They wake up to the sounds of a fight and a gunshot, and Brenda, an ER nurse, tries to save the wounded man. While grabbing towels to help, Reggie discovers the bag of money and takes it, believing all of their financial worries are now behind them. Now, the family has some threatening voice on the phone promising plenty of danger in front of them if they don't return the cash.

This is a relatively simple layout for a thriller, and with those pieces—the bag of cash, the unseen person behind that distorted voice, the abduction of a family member by some unknown enemy—in place, the plot finally seems to take some recognizable form. It's easy, to be sure, and predictable (Once we realize that there's really only one person who could know where the family is after leaving the motel, for example, the big reveal of the secret villain isn't much of one), but it's something, at least.

The screenwriters and Shelton, though, seem at a loss as to how to structure and stage what's essentially an extended chase, mixed with elements of a cat-and-mouse game between the family and those unknown villains. There's a lengthy diversion, for example, into the remote camp of a neo-Nazi group, where Brenda ends up after following someone who has stolen the money from the spot where she left it for the drug kingpin to retrieve. It's a useless sequence within the context of the plot—just another complication to prevent Brenda from proceeding—and a dishonest one—a superficially over-the-top threat that undermines the real danger a group like this would actually be—as a continuation of the previous scene with that racist pair.

Anyway, the family has to be chased by and fight the bad guys in familiar setups that are primarily notable—and not at all in a good way—for how Shelton lights everything—from farmhouses to the desert at night—in an unnatural neon glow. It looks and feels fake, but that's at least consistent with the plotting of End of the Road, which becomes more unconvincing with every leg of the journey.

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