Road of No Return

This was pretty entertaining. Definitely borrows heavily from Pulp Fiction but thats not a bad thing. There is some silliness but I felt entertained. Its pretty violent and the violence is well staged. There is enough action for action fans. Carridine and Madsen had some fun scenes together and I enjoyed watching them play off each other. Very tongue in cheek. Heck, its a decent movie. The plot is wild but not bad. There were some very amusing scenes and all the madness kinda works for the most part. A different kind of madcap action flick. Pretty good. I watched almost until the end when a jackash co worker knocked my portable DVD player over when he tripped on the cord. Kinda fitting way to wrap up the fun.

I saw a reasonable review for this movie and this combined with two well known actors persuaded me to give it a chance. Bad mistake, the characters were paper thin, the action was boring and badly executed, and the plot/script was very weak.

Caradine and Madsen were not the main characters (from length of time on the screen anyway) and so the film didn't really benefit greatly from their presence. I wasn't expecting a dumb action movie but that would have been preferable to what I did see, which was mostly dull and uninspired.

There were several attempts at comedy in the movie that I thought just didn't work very well. When I see Indie films they are quite often hit or miss and I often love or hate them, this one I just didn't like much. As a final thought, I think someone likened this film to Pulp Fiction but while there may have been some vague attempt at copying that style, sadly it falls far, far, far short of that movie.

"Road Of No Return" was one of the last movies David Carradine made before his death. Curious about if he was still able to give an entertaining performance at this time like his past performances was one reason why I rented it. Another reason was that Michael Madsen was also in the movie. The front of the DVD box seems to suggest that they are the two lead actors in the movie, but that isn't so - they are given supporting roles. Not only that, I noticed that though they share several scenes together, not once do you see both actors at the same time. (Obviously, they were each filmed at separate times and edited together later.) And Carradine looks very old and tired in all of his scenes.

I probably could have lived with those facts had the rest of the movie been entertaining, but in actual fact there's not much entertaining here. The movie has a sense of humor that is occasionally amusing, but is mostly loud and tiresome. While the movie is decently shot on a poverty row budget, the other production values are often flawed, with stuff like one shot being repeated, stock footage, and obvious post-dubbed dialogue. But the biggest problem is that the movie eventually comes to a slow crawl, and it's tiresome making the slow slog to the end. Some more gratuitous action and pruning down of scenes would have helped considerably.

I thought it was a really good film, clever and funny. This film was really about human relations touching on all aspects of life that affect us all such as religion, racism, nationalism, etc. The drug trafficking was just an instrument to bring these characters together. And I agree with the other reviewer that it was a conscious decision on part of the filmmaker to make the characters totally stereotypical. It worked for me. It was hilarious and drove the message home. Also the film had many heart-felt scenes and moments that tend to stay with you. The characters also stay with you. They were pretty likable and fun to watch. Having said all that, I think the film would have benefited from developing the story a bit more around the drug trafficking.

Where to begin, there were so many problems with this movie.

The written dialogue was often weak filler and the delivery was frequently unnatural. Almost as if the moments where the actors were exploring how to deliver the dialogue were captured and used to create the movie. At times there was dialogue when it wasn't needed.

Generally, a movie is good if the audience is not "aware" they are watching a movie. Thus when something in a movie forces the viewer to stop watching and think, it isn't a good movie. At one point in this film a character commits an action they regret right away, yet their dialogue states they didn't know *something* before they committed the action. However the character should still not know the *something*, yet they are lamenting what they have done because of the effect on *something*, which is unknown to them. Like a chunk of the movie is missing to explain what was going on, but actually it was just poorly written, in my estimation.

The big name actors both seem to be having a bad day on set, for almost the entire film. Michael Madsen & David Carradine are so very good in Kill Bill (1&2) yet somehow it seems they made no effort in Road of No Return. It is as if we are watching two actors who just happen to look like Madsen and Carradine, but lack their talent. Maybe they just could not get into their roles, perhaps the characters felt too similar to the characters they portrayed in Kill Bill.

Over acting and under acting were not the only weaknesses. The framing, lighting and dead end quality of some scenes creates an ongoing internal dialogue in the viewer. The voice in the mind of the audience is often saying things like: "Why did they shoot that scene in such a strange way?" "What was the value of that line of dialogue?" "Is this supposed to be a comedy?" "Why are the only good scenes the ones where someone is talking to the child actor?" "Is this whole movie a bizarre parody of a movie?" "Am I on candid camera as I watch this movie?"

The special effects are so lame the are almost non existent. With so much gun fire I was left wondering why there were so many poorly produced effects connected to gun fire? Less gun fire done well would have been a better idea.

Conceptually, the story line worked well, it was just the execution that sucked. (pardon the pun) In fact, the only reason I kept watching was to see how the story line played out.

Were the actors that bad or was there something else going on which caused this production to turn into card board cut out characters? I'm still not certain, but it felt like something was restricting all of the performances as they could not have all been uniformly bad actors.

In the end, this is a great movie for use in learning how NOT to shoot a movie.