Movie Review: ‘Desperation Road’

For a movie billed as an action thriller, Desperation Road contains a pleasantly surprising number of profound moments alongside the action and limited suspense. Admittedly, I have not read the book upon which this film is based, so I suspect I would not have been as surprised if I had; especially given that the book and film were written by the same person, Michael Farris Smith. There are some wonderful thought-provoking speeches and dialogue throughout the film which I think I enjoyed more than the action, though the action was nice, too.

Desperation Road opens with a mother and daughter returning to their home in Mississippi after being on the road for some time. While the pair are staying in a motel, the mother, Maben (Willa Fitzgerald, Scream: The TV series) gets abducted by a crooked cop who abuses her and then invites a couple of his friends to join them. Before the friends arrive, Maben defends herself and feels she must go on the run once returning to her daughter.

Cut to Russell Gaines (Garrett Hedlund, Friday Night Lights, Tron: Legacy), who is also returning home after being in prison. After a not-so-friendly greeting by two gentlemen that think Russell has not been punished enough for his crime, Russell makes his way to his father’s house; his father being portrayed by Mel Gibson (do I need to list his credits – if you have Peacock, he is currently in the John Wick spinoff series The Continental – I just cancelled Peacock because my budget has gotten too thin, though it may not be for long thanks to Continental, Chucky, and the FNAF movie).

For roughly the first half of the movie, Maben and Russell are in mostly independent stories each on their own path trying to redeem themselves from their past mistakes. This makes for great character development, though I did start to wonder if there was a reason why we had two (or three) separate stories going before their paths inevitably crossed. This crossing takes the movie in a new direction that also sheds more light on both of their characters.

I can imagine people saying, “the book was better” (that is just often the case because books have more storytelling space with which to work), but not having read the book myself, I can only say that this movie is well written and it has me interested in reading the book (I probably will not, to be honest, due to my increasingly shorter attention span, though I might look into it if there is an audio version). I enjoyed the music, the pacing of the storytelling, and I was kind of surprised to see that this was director Nadine Crocker’s only second time in the director’s chair. The two leads were believable and had me waiting to see what happened next. I might’ve liked more screen time with Gibson (I think he had maybe 5 minutes of the first hour), but most of his scenes felt natural and gave him a chance to be funny and/or thought-provoking. I am not sure if Gibson was supposed to be a bit of comic relief, but the one or two times I laughed was because of his lines that seemed to be intentionally humorous.

One final side note: One of Russell’s “welcoming party” is portrayed by Ryan Hurst whom I immediately recognized from Spielberg’s Taken (the good Taken, in my opinion) even with his excessive facial hair (others may recognize him from The Walking Dead or Sons of Anarchy). He gets a chance to shine with a tragic side story that intersects with Russell and Maben. He is not exactly a character one would root for, but you can kind of feel bad for the guy in some ways.