End of the Road: The Latest Queen Latifah and Ludacris Starrer Netflix film End of the Road starts out well, even if you don't know ...
End of the Road: The Latest Queen Latifah and Ludacris Starrer Netflix film
End of the Road starts out well, even if you don't know what to expect. I didn't do any research on the movie, so when I saw that Brenda, a single Black mother played by Queen Latifah, was missing her dead husband,I thought this would be a story about losing something. It starts with Brenda shopping for a cross-country road trip. She is moving to Texas with her two kids and pothead brother because they can no longer pay the rent in Los Angeles. She looks like she needs help from God and is doing everything she can to keep her family together. The kids don't want to leave Los Angeles. Everything is ready for a hard, moving look at love, loss, and identity.
But the road stops there. The movie, which is directed by Millicent Shelton, changes all of a sudden into a one-note road thriller. Brenda says that her father was a Colonel in the army and that he taught her how to hunt and use a gun. This is a pretty clear sign that chaos is on the way. Brenda takes a detour through the "badlands" of New Mexico, where her family runs into every stereotype in the book: racist white gangsters, a motel murder, a bag of money, a local sheriff, a cartel deal went wrong, an abduction, and a mysterious hillbilly killer. All of these near-death experiences should, of course, heal and bring the African-American family closer together. But the way it's made and the lack of depth and emotion make it hard to ignore the irony of the title. There are some similarities to Steven Spielberg's first movie, Duel, which was a "killer car movie" set on an American highway. But that's too nice for End of the Road, a movie that doesn't even go as far as adding the bad guys from Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth to make it a full house of horrors. X
At one point, Brenda fights a group of skinheads with her bare hands in a junkyard. At another point, a crazy old couple from a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie chases them through the woods in a car chase right out of a Tarantino wet dream with neon lights. It's one trial after another for a family that is almost exoticized because of the color of their skin. They are shown as tough cookies who fight racism every minute. Not to mention that the Wild West, where danger is around every corner, has become a sort of fetish. I'm starting to sound like the beginning of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which is kind of scary. This isn't a bad movie by any means; it's just old and full of templates, with nothing new to offer in terms of both story thrills and social/cultural meaning. Every time the family gets out of a jam, they go on their way, only to get into another. The writing lacks emotional continuity, and everything feels like a trick to show Brenda as a dangerous-when-wounded mom who will do anything to protect her family. Either it should be nonstop action (like Mad Max: Fury Road) or cheesy horror from the 1980s (Death Proof). End of the Road wants to be both, but it ends up being neither. This is mostly because it tries to put together a heart in the middle of everything.
As the cool pothead uncle in the family, rapper Ludacris is ridiculously unmoving. You can't tell if he's happy or in danger by looking at his face, which is why big sister Brenda is always so worried about keeping her younger siblings safe. The young actors are fine, and Queen Latifah makes lines like "Don't mess with my family" sound fresh with all of her experience. I can see why she would want to play this role, but the script reminds me of a typical trashy Netflix B-movie that you can forget as soon as it ends. The movie has some gratuitous gore and violence as a last-ditch effort to make it seem like it cares about the genre, but there's no getting around the fact that it was a bad idea to go down that path in the first place. It's not Brenda's fault, but it's also not her fault that the racial subtext makes the American heartland look like a nutjob circus. In a way, it was this kind of sloppy stereotyping and othering that led to the election of Donald Trump and the hate crimes against Black minorities across the country that followed. The car might be in the middle of nowhere, but the movie makes sure that even when they get to Texas, they stay in the middle of nowhere.