Road of No Return

I'm also kinda surprised with the couple of five star reviews ... they truly have not judged this on peer movies that it apes or aspires towards. The film maker drove a few pegs into the wall: hire some banner actors, do some (great) static shots of desert and rail cars .... the premise had so much promise here, what could have been done. Watching the film, it was obviously a rock-bottom budget attempt at milking the Tarantino theme, and the props, stage sets and so on were just pathetic. Continuity was rank, acting was wooden at best, script was just awful ..... really, the waste of talent, manpower, money and audience loyalty was tragic. I watched to the end, and kept muttering to myself; I wish - given the great pedigrees from Madsen and Carradine - that this had been done by a real script writer and a pro director. Trust me, this film is a real stinker.

This movie was a disappointment to watch as it had a poorly written script and the acting was average at best despite several well known actors. The cinematography and special effects were however mostly good.

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.

"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 caught this movie on my tv like 30 minutes into the actual movie, I thought it was supposed to be a comedy but after looking it up I realized the movie was supposed to be a serious action/thriller. You will probably like the movie a lot more if you take it less serious, but overall it's still pretty bad. The characters I guess were trying to be interesting but overall they were just goofy. It's pretty clear this movie was trying to go for a good mix of action/comedy but they just suck at doing what they were trying to do and could not mix these two together. They were trying to do what Pulp Fiction does but did it worse on every level. Surprised I caught this movie in 2023 because it feels like something that would just be completely forgotten. Watch the movie if you like to laugh at how mediocre it is, that's about it.