RIDE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Ride, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2024

Director/star Jake Allyn and Josh Plasse's screenplay for Ride takes a significant detour that re-defines and ultimately derails this drama about a struggling family in Texas. It's not as if the assorted melodrama that makes up the first half or so of this movie works, but how much of that is the result of the filmmakers refusing to even give it a chance to do so?

The two major threads here revolve around a father and a son. John Hawkins (C. Thomas Howell), the dad, lives on a ranch outside a Texas town that's filled with rodeo folk. He used to be a part of that, too, but after having kids with his Sheriff wife Monica (Annabeth Gish), John devoted himself to the less-dangerous life of teaching, tending to horses, and raising his children.

Now, his life revolves around his pre-teen daughter Virgina (Zia Carlock), who is about to released from the hospital after undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. On the day that was supposed to be the daughter's return home, the doctor informs John and Monica that they've discovered new tumors, that the girl's body won't take another round of chemo, and that her only hope of survival is expensive cell therapy at an out-of-town clinic. Since the family already owes money to the bank for the loan they took out for the first set of treatments, it's up to them to find a way to pay more than $100,000 for this session.

The other storyline belongs to John and Monica's eldest child Peter (Allyn), who was also hoping for a joyous homecoming. He has been in prison for about four years for a crime that's withheld from us for a while, and only his grandfather Al (Forrie J. Smith) shows up to bring Peter home. Almost immediately, Peter winds up with an old criminal acquaintance named Tyler (Patrick Murney) and promises to give all of his bull-riding winnings to the drug dealer to pay back a debt he owes the guy.

Through all of this, the screenplay hints at a deeper history and a darker undercurrent to what has come between Peter and the rest of his family. We know the crime resulted in the death of someone (A woman confronts John and Monica in church to establish that fact without explaining anything), and we know the once-promising cowboy has struggled with addiction, to alcohol and presumably drugs, in the past.

There's almost a sense of defeat from the beginning of the movie, knowing that the challenge of the family's medical and financial woes is the far more compelling and sympathetic angle of the story. Peter's role here is to mope about his continued misfortune and be angry with how helpless he is to do anything about his younger sister's circumstances, and the shallowness of the character's existence and the mystery of his back story certainly don't help to make him anything more than an inevitable plot device for that shift in the narrative.

The whole screenplay has a tendency to establish concepts and characters, only to dismiss them once the actual plot takes over. There's the grandfather, for example, who offers occasional words of wisdom to his troubled grandson, and as for middle child Noah (Josh Plasse), he has his own monologue explaining the history of the town he'll be leaving soon in order to go to college with his pretty singer girlfriend (played by Laci Kaye Booth).

The second half of the movie, after the event that changes everything, amounts to a lot of speech-making—from the father and son having their respective moments to Monica soliloquizing about being torn between her duties to the law and her family. It's somehow both too much and too little far too late, and it's more than a little odd that the death that Peter caused and that put in him in prison barely figures into any of this.

Anyway, none of the family drama actually matters once Peter comes up with a plan to rob Tyler and a desperate John decides to go along with it. The movie attempts to become a thriller, as the father and son set out to cover up the crime and its unintended—but completely predictable—consequences. However, their sheer incompetence in doing so, leaving behind obvious clues and creating a direct line from the stolen cash to them, is almost comical.

The severe tone of all of this is sincere and, once it becomes clear that neither the drama nor the thriller elements are functioning on a basic level, unfortunate. Ride doesn't trust the potential strength of its down-to-earth story and has misplaced confidence in its ability to juggle multiple characters, ideas, and modes of storytelling.

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