End of the Road

For a family on a trip across the country, looking to start a new life, the open road becomes a highway to hell, as they find themselves in the crosshairs of a killer. Now, alone in the wide open spaces of this country, with only each other to rely on, the family must fight to stay alive.

After her husband dies of cancer, Queen Latifah and her brother Ludacris decide to move her small and still grieving family from California to Houston, choosing to drive across the vast desert of White America that lay between, where a chance encounter in a seedy motel puts a bag of money in their laps, and a whole bunch of angry white people on their tails.

Reminiscent of the classic “middle of nowhere on the long lonesome highway” thrillers like Duel or Breakdown, End of the Road is your basic morality play movie. Much like the Hook Hand Killer is intended to scare teenagers out of having sex, this film is meant to remind you that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, and also, that nothing is ever free. This is the kind of story where the characters make one wrong decision, take one wrong turn, and everything goes to shit, and now they’re out in the middle of nowhere, racing along that long ribbon of highway, with no one around for miles, and nothing ahead of them but more nothing, chased by relentless killers, and to be fair… it’s kinda, a little bit, mostly, their own fault, right? Because they should’ve stayed honest.

But they weren’t…

That’s the main thing going on here, or at least, one of the main things.

Full of one-liners and hero shots, End of the Road is a modern day cautionary tale done in the classic style of a mid-budget thriller from the 80s and 90s, but specifically for POC: “Stay out of the Hinterlands of White America, because they’ll fucking get your ass.” That’s the lesson here, the warning, the other main thing going on. This is a movie about an undeniable reality for a lot of people living in modern day America, a reality that is getting worse every single day…

Don’t trust cops, and don’t trust whitey.

But that’s not to say that this film is all that deep, or that it’s a strident message film either. In the end, End of the Road is mostly just a fun, thrilling, and ridiculous bit of action fluff. Stuff blows up. There’s some fun gunfights and some car chases, and a lot of tense moments. Also, I’m a fan of the action hero mama bear era of Queen Latifah, so that’s fun too.

Basically, you know you’re in for a classic action/thriller flick when a character just casually mentions early on in the film that their dad was in the army, and that when they were a child, he taught them “how to hunt, how shoot, and how to fight… and when not to.”

That’s movie shorthand for “shit is about to go down.”