Desperation Road ** (out of 5) (R) Billed as a Southern noir thriller, this drama plays out as an urbanite’s view of everything redneck. Well, almost everything. It’s missing a blue tick hound and a meth lab. But all the other types and tropes expected in small southern towns of filmdom are there, from dastardly deputies to barroom brawls. Every vehicle I can recall is either a pickup, semi or squad car. Shotguns abound. Grudges run deep.
We meet a scruffy guy (Garrett Hedlund) as he’s released from prison and returning to his shabby little home town. It will take quite a while to learn why he was sent to the slammer, and why he came back to where he is anything but welcome, as shown by the beating he gets the moment his feet touch native soil. Before that, the film had opened with a young woman (Willa Fitzgerald) fleeing from someone and turning tricks at truck stops to keep food on the table for her young daughter. After bumming around the South in her Daisy Duke cutoffs and living hand to mouth, she winds up in her home town for reasons we never learn, despite some major dangers awaiting them.
Naturally, the two meet, not only by chance, but by what proves to be a coincidence beyond the pale for romcoms, and way too unlikely for a “serious” film. Just about the only friendly face our protagonists can find belongs to Hedlund’s pappy (Mel Gibson). A lot of bad stuff either happens or looms over them until a reasonably viable ending to a whole lotta unreasonable events.
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It’s kind of interesting to see Mel in such a small, though positive role. Fitzgerald, who was terrific as the costarring deputy in the streaming series, Reacher (the one with a no-nonsense hulk in the title role, rather than little Tommy Cruise’s movie versions), fares pretty well for the script she’s stuck with. Otherwise, there’s truly nothing memorable about this tale. The rest are fungible types filling expected slots and doing expected things. If you want to see it in theaters, act quickly, ‘cause it ain’t likely to get a long run. The home viewing options should do just fine on this one.
(Desperation Road, open in select theaters, On Demand and digital formats as of 10/6/23)