Road of No Return‘s DVD cover stars gravel-voiced Michael Madsen and martial arts master David Carradine, in this quirky DVD cover about two chain-smoking hitmen who enjoy pointing guns and looking cool… on DVD covers. As far as DVD covers go, it’s pretty good! Of course the actual movie doesn’t follow these two, and is painfully, painfully bad.
We rented this movie partially in the hopes of seeing a hilarious ripoff of a Tarantino flick, since the back of the box proudly listed Kill Bill and Resevoir Dogs; the kind of failure that might suck as much as Last Hour, which also starred these two fine gentlemen. What we did not expect was a story about little girls and racial stereotypes…
"Hey Molly, what's a bait-and-switch?" "Well, it all starts like this..."
Yes, this movie is in the same vein as Brothers in Arms, being a boring, politically correct, hidden agenda about racism and feelings. Reviewing it on its own terms would not only be dull, but it would be doing injustice to the grand vision of its writer-director-producer Parviz Saghizadeh, so instead we’ll look at it for what it really is: a concealed predator, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting victims. Victims like us.
There are plenty of movies with misleading advertisement, and although it can lead to a satisfying twist (such as Vanilla Sky), most of the time it’s just annoying as hell. Road of No Return, meanwhile, is actually designed to punish those who are attracted by its premise. It still follows the guise of a regular movie, but it replaces everything you’d want to see (action, danger, suspense) with exactly what you don’t want to see (touchy-feely melodrama). Shifting the spotlight from Madsen to a literally nameless character who’ll serve as the main character from here on, we’re forced to join a gang of utterly one-dimensional “hitmen” with no personality except the stereotype the represent. A big black man with no education and a hard time expressing his feelings (codename “Blackey”); a calm native American who smokes the peace pipe and reads a book on the Great Spirit of Mother Earth (codename “Indian”); and an obnoxious white supremacist from the south who chews tobacco and mocks other cultures (“Whitey”). Amazingly, the only well-rounded, intelligent and unbiased one is the Middle Eastern man who goes by the name of “Foreigner”.
That’s a coincidence, of course. The nationality of the writer/producer/director has nothing to do with it, I’m sure.
"MAAAAAW?!"
In the above image, you can see “Whitey” spitting out his food when his mom arrives at the gang’s lodgings. Now I want to discuss why a movie like this needs to be a bait-and-switch.
Those who have seen its true face will understand that, like the hideous swamp creature, it does so out of necessity. After all, nobody would rent a movie with the actual main characters on the cover, entitled something appropriate like “Stupid Lessons on Racial Diversity From People You Don’t Care About”, now would they? No, you need to make people think they’re going to see a cool movie, perhaps in the vein of Resevoir Dogs or Kill Bill, which are both prominently listed beside the actors’ names on the back of the DVD cover. Then, when they pop in the disc… BAM! The hideous swamp creature clutches its victim and begins its desperate struggle for victory.
The Whitey-Mom relationship is bordering on slapstick comedy, but with a twist: it’s actually an excuse to expose “white power” as hypocritical! We find out from his mother that Whitey is not as “white” as he thinks he is. No, his father was actually a mixture of all sorts of races, and he got raped frequently in prison! Shocking, I know! Why are we supposed to care? I guess we’re supposed to relate to him, since, after all, we’re despicable Tarantino-movie-loving Western bigots ourselves.
Here, a group of Asian evangelists interrupt a standoff in order to preach the Gospel. The “Blackey” character tells them that Jesus was black, while the Asians argue that he was Asian. And the three Mexican guys who are also involved in the standoff? They think he’s Mexican. Wow, what a great commentary… thanks for arbitrarily throwing it in?
The racism of this movie is glaring, but because it’s not “white power” racism it’s supposed to be acceptable. In one scene, where Blackey and the Foreigner are eating at a diner, the Foreigner harmlessly observes that Blackey likes to eat fried chicken. Blackey, hypersensitive to racial stereotypes, flips out and says that it’s a “racial observation”, but Foreigner (as per usual) doesn’t show any sign of flaw or bias, and tries explaining himself. Blackey doesn’t care about that, and starts saying that the Foreigner’s roast beef looks like a vagina.
I don’t know what kind of vagina Blackey (or for that matter, Parviz,) has been looking at, but to me it looks more like the Rakk Hive Monster from Borderlands…
Roast Beef Monster?
This movie is nothing more than a list of bland, outdated moral lectures thrown randomly on a pile for viewers to hear. It was marketed as an action movie in order to attract the audience that Parviz wanted to preach to, because he (or perhaps the publishers) realized that nobody cared about the stupid shit he was talking about, or would watch the movie unless they had been tricked.
Lesson learned: don’t trust foreigner writer/directors.
