Queen Latifah Can’t Save Netflix’s 'End of the Road' From Hitting a Dead End

By Petr Navovy | Film | September 12, 2022 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | September 12, 2022 |

It’s a curious thing, presence, charisma—movie stardom. When it comes to clichés, ‘You either have it or you don’t’, is about as worn as it can get, but movie stardom is one of the strongest cases for its accuracy. Those ineffable qualities are rare and hard to come by, and they can’t be bought. Some people are just made that way. Queen Latifah is one of those people. The actor uses that X factor to invest the new Netflix drama/action/thriller, End of the Road, with healthy doses of warmth, humor, and sheer presence, but it’s unfortunately nowhere near enough to prevent the film from careening off road and straight into a ditch.

To be fair to first-time movie director Millicent Shelton (Locke & Key, Black-ish), there are moments in End of the Road that hint at something better, though they mostly manifest in a few interesting-ish shots that dare to mildly mix up the standard Netflix approach of ‘frame the subject so that we know what the subject is’ to cinematography. The film’s DP Ed Wu might have had something to do with that too, but End of the Road also has a relatively promising opening, establishing its characters and their motivations quickly and effectively while creating a decent bond between them and the audience. It’s nothing groundbreaking by any means, but these days I go into Netflix productions with bar set very low indeed, as basics like that are not always easy to come by.

Queen Latifah plays Brenda here, a widow who is being forced to relocate from L.A. to Texas after getting into debt trying to pay her ailing husband’s medical bills. Joining her on her multi-day road trip are her stoner-slacker brother Reggie (Ludacris), teenage daughter Kelly (Mychala Lee), and younger son Cam (Shaun Dixon). I haven’t included any adjectives for the kids there, because by and large the script (by Christopher J. Moore, in his first feature, and David Loughery, who wrote Obsessed, lol) doesn’t bother with them either. The young actors acquit themselves well enough, but what little substance there is is reserved for the elder characters. As already mentioned, Queen Latifah does a lot of heavy lifting here. Similarly, Ludacris does what he can with what he’s been given, raising a few minor laughs in his comic relief role where otherwise there might have been none. It’s just that there really isn’t that much here to work with in the first place.

That paucity of substance is echoed in the film’s other focus outside of the drama at its core: Tension and action. Because, you see, this roadtrip isn’t just fraught with emotional damage, but plenty of physical trauma too, as the family find themselves tangling with all manner of folk who wish—for varying reasons—to do them harm. There’s racists, and drug dealers, and kidnappers, and even Beau Bridges shows up (although he is admittedly trying to lend a helping hand)! There are beats here taken from No Country For Old Men, which is an extremely unfortunate comparison for … well, pretty much any film that isn’t No Country For Old Men, as bringing that phenomenal piece of filmmaking to mind only serves to highlight the shortcomings in End of the Road’s attempts at mimicking an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Through weaknesses in its writing, pacing, and staging, we never feel even the beginnings of an involuntary slide to the edge of our seat. My backside, for one, remained firmly in that comfortable wedge right at the back of the sofa, slightly between the vertical cushion and the horizontal. The action scenes here too, such as they are, mostly range from competent to inept. Put it this way: It should be way more fun to see Queen Latifah fighting off some neo-Nazis in the desert. Aside from the fundamental structural problems in the film’s screenplay, that really is the biggest crime here.

End of the Road is streaming now on Netflix.