Unstoppable (dir. William Goldenberg)
As a huge fan of the Rocky series, it’s hard for me to discount a film for being formulaic. There are only so many permutations of win/lose/draw, and America’s favorite never-ending boxing franchise has already been double-dipping for years. Yet somehow it remains fresh, inspirational, and entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Unstoppable, the saccharine telling of a true story that deserves a much better movie. It’s a satisfying film in fits and starts, specifically when it plays to formula, but short of a handful of solid performances and a couple of stirring wrestling sequences, this is a movie you’ve seen a superior version of many times before.
Jharrel Jerome plays Anthony Robles, a talented wrestler who was born with just one leg. He doesn’t let his disability stop him or even slow him down. The fact of the matter is that he’s damn good at his sport, and he works harder at it than anyone else. His goal, plainly stated, is that he wants to win a national championship so he can become more than his disability in the eyes of others. He wishes to inspire anyone and everyone to work hard and pursue their own dreams with the same fervor he exhibits. And to that end, mission accomplished. Shame about the movie though.
The bulk of the story consists of Robles being told that he either can’t do something, or should do something different than what he wants to do. Then, through a series of standard trials and tribulations, Robles proves himself to everyone.
Over and over again.
Granted, as a true story we must assume that this is how it all went down, but there’s got to be a better way of making it work on screen. The biggest flaw (beside’s Jennifer Lopez’s embarrassingly awful performance — potentially a career worst) is in Robles’ characterization. Jerome does excellent work, but as written, Robles undergoes no growth whatsoever. He’s the same determined young man at the end of the film as he is at the beginning. The supporting characters are mostly stagnant as well, and all speak and behave as if they know they’re in a movie. Don Cheadle does great work as Robles’ coach, but every word he speaks could’ve been pulled from a fortune cookie.
The film is ostensibly about how important self-determination is — how, with hard work and a refusal to give up, amazing things can be accomplished. So why is it that the plot just sorta happens to Robles? Yeah, he works hard, but it fails to register as agency. The movie does a disservice to its subject: almost every bit of conflict outside of the final match is solved by exterior forces. Robles feels like a footnote in his own movie.
The best that can be said is that the film functions. It goes through motions you’ve seen before, and does so with precision and earnestness…
…and then it ends and leaves your mind completely.
The second best thing that can be said is that Bobby Cannavale unintentionally gives one of 2024’s finest comedic performances as Robles’ dickhead stepdad. I like Cannavale, but here he feels like he’s been lifted from a MadTV sketch.
It’s a bad sign when the postscript is infinitely more moving and effective than the movie that precedes it, but at least we all had a warmhearted laugh when a picture of Robles and President Obama hit the screen and a little girl in the theater yelled “OBAMBA!”
Desert Road (dir. Shannon Triplett)
There’s no denying the ambition and imagination on display in Desert Road, a busy little time-loop thriller that, if it were shorter by an hour, could make for a great episode of The Twilight Zone. All the pieces are there: a compelling protagonist stuck in an otherworldly scenario, a suspicious supporting cast, and a sci-fi concept that doubles as the film’s mystery/narrative thrust. This should be more than enough to get the film across the finish line in terms of functionality, but without a compelling “why” to bring it all together, it becomes a forgettable novelty rather than a thematically rich thriller.
Kristine Froseth plays our anonymous protagonist, a young woman driving alone en route to her mother’s house. She gets in a small accident and hoofs her way to a nearby filling station for a tow, but she soon realizes that she’s trapped. No matter which direction she walks on this empty stretch of road, she ends up right back at her car.
It’s a spooky idea, and it provides an opportunity for many potentially heady plot threads to be dangled with the promise of leading to some sort of mind-melting conclusion. Desert Road fails to capitalize on any of these threads in a story sense, which creates a mystery with no answer. Instead, the film treats its own established concept as the mystery itself — a concept that we understand immediately upon entering. It’s a frustrating experience to be two steps ahead of a movie that doesn’t realize it’s two steps behind. Instead of wondering where the story was headed, I found myself waiting for it to get to where I already knew it was going.
Once it hits the final twenty minutes or so it starts to become the film it should have been the whole time, dishing out heady high-concept fun with style. Froseth is compelling throughout, but once her character catches up with those of us in the theater, it provides an opportunity for her to move beyond the thankless task of expositing out loud for no one at all (and jotting down expository notes in large print for all of us to see) and to dive into the film’s skewed reality. The final acts cooks so hard (even if it leads to an unsatisfying conclusion), that it retroactively makes what came before feel even more weightless than it already did. It all feels like so much wheel-spinning. There’s no denying that this is an ambitious, thoughtful film, but it would’ve been served much better as a short.