Brenda’s maturity comes to the fore when she chastises her daughter for showing poor judgement (“Do you know the kind of place we’re in?”) and holds her brother back from confronting the redneck duo. The chase sequence from the gas station, after Kelly flips off two lewd, young white men, is well conceived and adequately unnerving. ![]() You can broadly guess what’s coming up next, which is fine, so long as the treatment of the subject matter is good and the scenes are not too predictable. A detour of 85 miles takes them into a seedy, redneck town. Up until their first brush with racism on the freeway, the film does okay. This sentiment is embodied by Queen Latifah’s character throughout the story, making her the undeclared head and moral centre of this household…the person everyone turns to when the chips are down. They haven’t deserved half of what life has thrown at them (death of a loved one, foreclosure on their house, etc.), yet they continue to fight the good fight. What End of the Road also makes you feel is empathy the family has fallen on hard times and is looking to catch a break in an honest, respectable way. But the banter, the inside jokes, the fights and the deep familiarity just go to prove how united they are. And it’s precisely this relatability that warms you to these characters.Īt first glance, they don’t strike you as close-knit. They make fun of him for trying too hard to play the cool, hip uncle. He isn’t rolling in riches but his heart has all the room for his sister, niece and nephew. Her not-so-successful brother, Reggie (Ludacris), joins them for support. She may not wish to uproot her children, Kelly (Mychala Lee) and Cam (Shaun Dixon), but the financial burden from her late husband’s prolonged illness has taken its toll, leaving her no choice in the matter. Brenda (Queen Latifah), an ER nurse, is forced to give up her home in LA and move to the Deep South. The premise of the film, though bordering on cliché, has us on board with the hopes and dreams of the black American family at the centre of the narrative. You can’t mask bad writing with believable acting performances, unfortunately.Ĭast: Queen Latifah, Ludacris, Mychala Faith Lee, Shaun Dixon, Beau Bridges It starts off fairly well and continues to engage for the initial twenty-five minutes, but the sticky road trip takes a nosedive with its first wrong turn, signalling the premature unravelling of End of the Road. ![]() The sad part about End of the Road is that Queen Latifah, Lucacris, Mychala Lee and Shaun Dixon act rather decently in a subpar and predictable film.
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