Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Say hello to the late David Carradine, the Tupac Shakur of movie actors. True enough Mr. Carradine has been dead for going on two years now, but yet every time I turn around I see where Mr. Carradine has lent his talents to yet another low budget epic. We can’t even mourn the man properly because in death he makes movies than practically all other actors who are living. Combined. Today we see the late David Carradine on the box cover of this movie ‘Road of no Return’ standing along side one Michael Madsen, an actor who gives less of a damn about what he will he do for a paycheck than even the late Mr. Carradine did, and that’s saying something. Just so you know, neither of those two cats are the stars of this movie. Just so you know.

Katie (Carlie Westerman), the worlds most adorable little orphan girl, has a story to tell. A little while ago a couple of rouge DEA agents in Marcone (Madsen) and Hover (Carradine) had decided that it is nigh time they take justice into their own hands and end this nation of our drug problem. The issue they face is that there aren’t nearly enough rogue agents to carry out this nationwide simultaneous eradication so they have to contract out a lot of this work to hired assassins. This introduces to a pair of hitmen, and this films true stars, in the man codenamed ‘Foreigner’ (Michael Blaine Rozgay) and the man codenamed ‘Blacky (Ernest Anthony). It’s a nine day op in which Foreigner and Blacky will share a run down apartment with fellow hitmen Whitey (Shane Woodson) the white supremacist and Indian (Jose Andrews) who is a Native American.

Where does little Katie come in on all of this? Well while Foreigner and Whitey were in the process of whacking some Mexican drug dealers they also managed to stop Katie and her big sister Becky (Michelle Capra) from being sold into white pedophile slavery. Now our hitmen are kind of stuck babysitting these two kids and Whitey’s mom… it’s complicated… while carrying out their hitman duties.

Of course our rouge agents just can’t let these killers run free after the gig is done and they must be erased. Unfortunately these are the worst erasers ever and they fail to erase everybody, mainly because everybody wasn’t home at the time. Eraser rule Number One… make sure everybody is home that you need to erase.

So that leaves one drug addicted foreigner, one fried chicken addicted Black Guy and one miserable ass blue eyed white girl all alone to get revenge against those who would do them wrong. It’s time to paint the desert red. That’s what the Black Guy said.

To be kind ‘Road of no Return’ is pretty shitty, but to its credit it’s not nearly shitty enough to go up in the Garbage Corner of this particular website which means there is some value here. Probably the number one problem with this movie, and there are a few, is that producer / writer / director Parviz Saghizadeh hasn’t learned how to direct a movie yet. Rest assured that film direction is a skill and it can be taught. The best have skill and talent but through careful observation or class study or personal tutelage or trial and error… you still have to learn how to do it. The pacing is off, the action sequences are suspect, the movie looked way cheaper than I’m guessing it actually was, the acting is sub par – and that includes Carradine and Madsen – with most of these issues coming back around to Saghizadeh’s short coming as a film director. At least at that moment in time because my man might be better now.

But as we said there is some value here. For instance, despite the fact that I’m dead certain that our two headline stars, David Carradine and Michael Madsen at no time were ever in the same room at the same time at anytime during this shoot, Saghizadeh did a fine job of at least making it look like they might’ve been personally interacting with each other. Also careful observation showed us the catering with this movie was done by Popeye’s fried chicken and the Miller Beer corp., since there was a lot Popeye’s being eaten in this movie and Miller being drank up which the producer managed to cleverly integrate into the storyline which is borderline genius. Plus I like Popeye’s and if I have to drink domestic, I drink Miller.

The director might’ve wanted to study Angry Black People and White Supremacist a little closer before writing dialog for those characters because the buffoonery offered up by those two was almost too much to tolerate but the little girl was pretty good. And while the dialog for this movie was uniformly terrible, it also provided the most joy due to its terribleness. The Angry Black Guy kneels down and tells the kid he likes her. The kid cutely wheezes out, ‘even though I’m kid?’. The Angry Black guy goes ‘yeah, even though you’re a kid’. The sad kid goes ‘even though I’m white?’ The Angry Black Guy responds with ‘especially because you’re white’. Seriously Angry Black Guy? Especially because she’s white? Does that sound like something any halfway self-respecting, whitey hating, conspiracy loving Angry Black Guy would say? You should’ve put your director in check on that one Ernest Anthony.

I don’t know how this movie actually came about considering Jose Andrews who played Indian is listed to have passed away in 2001 and yet this movie was released late in 2009, so this might’ve also contributed to the fractured discombobulated nature of the whole production but regardless, no matter what the circumstances, ‘Road of no Return’ was pretty damn bad. Rest in peace Jose Andrews and David Carradine. Even though I’ll probably be seeing Mr. Carradine in another movie in few days.