Road of No Return is notable more than anything else for having signs of a great cast despite a pathetically awful script. The movie poster has some promise, with Michael Madsen and David Carradine posing opposite each other in a picture that seems to promise a gritty and powerful action drama, but such is not to be the case. This thing is so bad that it's amazing that it ever got made at all, much less that stars of such caliber as Madsen and Carradine signed on.
The story concerns a group of hit men who have been hired by a group of shady businessmen. The hit men are all interchangeable caricatures, paper-thin stereotypes that are thrown together and spend the majority of the movie in close quarters getting to know each other and sharing their feelings. Soon it is revealed that the men that hired them are government officials who are forced to fly under the radar to take out some major drug dealers because those pesky liberal laws prevent them from really being able to do their jobs.
The fact that the movie is based on a government agency that has to hide their dealings from Washington in order to avoid getting in trouble for doing their jobs does not speak well for the coherence of the script, since at one point David Carradine's character explains that Washington has authorized them to use "extreme measures" against drug traffickers.
Complicating matters is the fact that the hired hit men noted one of their license plates during the hiring process and are looking into the backgrounds of their employers. A bunch of nonsense follows and ultimately everyone is put into a position where the hit men want to get paid and the men that hired them decide that the only way they can safely get out of the whole thing is to kill all of them. Clean the cleaners, as it were.
Oh, and did I mention the kids? Early in the film, two of the hit men pull off a multiple homicide which leaves two young girls stranded and with nowhere to go, so the hit men take them in and take turns being bizarre father figures for them. I love the thought that went into this. The girls were at one point about to be sold into sexual slavery by the bad guys, but the good bad guys take them in.
One of the girls is killed (or taken away or something, I can't remember and don't care to go back and find out), leaving only one of them, a young girl of about ten years old. Here's a little exchange that should reveal something about the kind of script that this movie comes from. One day, she's relaxing in a hotel room with two of the hit men, and one of them leans over and starts doing lines of cocaine off the bedside table. When the girl gets upset, he sits up, concerned, and asks, "What's the matter?" He seems genuinely confused.
The end credits of Road of No Return inform us that the movie is written and directed by "Dr." Parviz Saghizadeh. I have no idea what kind of doctor this person is, but I can tell you that it is not a doctor of philosophy, otherwise he would have noticed the pathetic shallowness of the political nonsense that this movie tries to pass on. David Carradine's character ham-handedly delivers it in this charming bit of dialogue:
"How the hell did we get into this mess anyhow? It's those damn liberals. If we had tough laws and tough judges with balls enough to put these drug traffickers behind bars and throw away the keys "
So you see, it's all the liberals' fault that they were forced to hire hit men and that those poor kids got blown up in that car bomb and that the girls had no parents and were going to be sold into child prostitution and the whole world is just coming apart. I have a question though, who's fault is it that this mess of a movie got made?
The story concerns a group of hit men who have been hired by a group of shady businessmen. The hit men are all interchangeable caricatures, paper-thin stereotypes that are thrown together and spend the majority of the movie in close quarters getting to know each other and sharing their feelings. Soon it is revealed that the men that hired them are government officials who are forced to fly under the radar to take out some major drug dealers because those pesky liberal laws prevent them from really being able to do their jobs.
The fact that the movie is based on a government agency that has to hide their dealings from Washington in order to avoid getting in trouble for doing their jobs does not speak well for the coherence of the script, since at one point David Carradine's character explains that Washington has authorized them to use "extreme measures" against drug traffickers.
Complicating matters is the fact that the hired hit men noted one of their license plates during the hiring process and are looking into the backgrounds of their employers. A bunch of nonsense follows and ultimately everyone is put into a position where the hit men want to get paid and the men that hired them decide that the only way they can safely get out of the whole thing is to kill all of them. Clean the cleaners, as it were.
Oh, and did I mention the kids? Early in the film, two of the hit men pull off a multiple homicide which leaves two young girls stranded and with nowhere to go, so the hit men take them in and take turns being bizarre father figures for them. I love the thought that went into this. The girls were at one point about to be sold into sexual slavery by the bad guys, but the good bad guys take them in.
One of the girls is killed (or taken away or something, I can't remember and don't care to go back and find out), leaving only one of them, a young girl of about ten years old. Here's a little exchange that should reveal something about the kind of script that this movie comes from. One day, she's relaxing in a hotel room with two of the hit men, and one of them leans over and starts doing lines of cocaine off the bedside table. When the girl gets upset, he sits up, concerned, and asks, "What's the matter?" He seems genuinely confused.
The end credits of Road of No Return inform us that the movie is written and directed by "Dr." Parviz Saghizadeh. I have no idea what kind of doctor this person is, but I can tell you that it is not a doctor of philosophy, otherwise he would have noticed the pathetic shallowness of the political nonsense that this movie tries to pass on. David Carradine's character ham-handedly delivers it in this charming bit of dialogue:
"How the hell did we get into this mess anyhow? It's those damn liberals. If we had tough laws and tough judges with balls enough to put these drug traffickers behind bars and throw away the keys "
So you see, it's all the liberals' fault that they were forced to hire hit men and that those poor kids got blown up in that car bomb and that the girls had no parents and were going to be sold into child prostitution and the whole world is just coming apart. I have a question though, who's fault is it that this mess of a movie got made?