Thunder Road

Saw this a Hell's Half Mile Film fest in Bay City, Michigan and Jim Cummings wrote, directed and gave a stunning lead performance in this festival gem, which I believe is his first full feature after bouncing around doing short films and a little TV work. He has the acting chops to pull off his own written vision of this unstable police officer who can slip from calm, deranged and sorrowful multiple times within one scene. Impressive for he must do this most if not all of this 90 minute film carrying off this complicated character through losing his mother, wife in divorce, his job and every thing he holds dear as he sinks into despair. I hope this propels his movie making skills to new wide release films in the future.

To be honest I never heard of Jim Cummings before, not as an actor nor as a writer, nor as a director, but after watching Thunder Road I will remember him in the future. This movie is a strange mixture of drama and comedy. You never completely know if it is sadness or laughter they were looking for and that's all credit to the excellent acting of Jim Cummings. I never saw a grown man crying so much in a movie and still be funny due to his facial expressions whilst crying. I truly enjoyed Thunder Road and I'm sure plenty of others will do also. An easy to watch story, with mixed emotions, but in the end better than I thought it would be.

I don't think I got an experience watching a movie like this one , it made me laugh , it made me sad , made me laugh while being sad , sad while laughing , and Jim Cummings great performance really helped make that happen . The timing of comedy yeah was weird and in other movies I would hate it but I don't know why but it wasn't a problem for me . Yeah some scenes felt pointless to the story overall but they were also enjoyable . Jim wanted to talk about many things in his movie but I think the main idea is the feeling of losing everything and everyone you love and acting like you are still in control and that everything is just fine . So I will be looking forward for more from him.

I looked up this movie for one reason, only a day before I had watched Jocelyn DeBoer in "Greener Grass", the first I have seen of her, and was totally taken by how good she was in that one. So I naturally wondered how she would be in this one. It turns out her role as the estranged wife of officer Arnaud is not a very large one so she doesn't really stand out in this one.

"Thunder Road" is the brainchild of Jim Cummings who wrote, directed, and stars as Austin Texas police officer Jim Arnaud. As other reviewers have said the various scenes don't always connect into a broader story, the main feature is the bipolar nature of officer Arnaud. At times he will be calm and professional then some small thing will trigger him and he will become totally emotional and out of control. While this provides some interest by the end of the movie it has gotten old.

For me the best part of the movie was the character played by Kendal Farr, as the 9-yr-old daughter Crystal Arnaud. She is very cute and her acting is always spot on for the situation.

I found this to be an interesting take on mental illness but some of the extended screaming was hard to take, the "mute" button came in handy. I rate it as a mostly marginal movie, interesting to some but not to most general audiences.

I watched it streaming from Amazon via Roku.

In Thunder Road, director Jim Cummings carves an almost perfect study of a character going through an emotional breakdown after the death of his mother. So much that together with Cummings's superb performance and a somber soundtrack that drives melancholy home, it is perhaps the very reason why the dark comedy drama is one of the best films to come out in 2018. There's so much to look and think about in Thunder Road, in some scenes, I just could not feel I had a bowl of popcorn in my hands. It's splendid and you need to watch it right now. TN.