Movie Review: The Road

Movie Review: The Road

Just seen this movie and that is my advice to you moviegoers - hit the road and give this movie the flick.

Or more succinctly, as my partner put it on our grateful exit from the cinema: "Dull and Boring".

Rating: 1 out of 10

The Road the movie, was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name (2006) by Cormac McCarthy (author of No Country for Old Men, which incidentally was, unlike The Road, brilliantly adapted for the movies). The movie The Road was directed by John Hillcoat, and features famous names like Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce.

However the lead roles are carried by Viggo Mortensen (father) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (son). Viggo Mortensen was deliciously masterful as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Kodi Smit-McPhee is an Australian child actor. John Hillcoat was born in Queensland, Australia. And Guy Pearce (who is virtually impossible to spot in The Road - in large part, due to the small and unimportant part he played in the movie) is also an Australian and normally, a very good actor.

The Story

The story is about the survival journey along an endlessly bleak and dangerous road after an unspecified world-wide apocalypse that has left the world barren of fauna and flora and left in its wake, a diminishing handful of straggling, starving survivors and ruthless, hungry gangs of cannibals. The Road focuses on this father and son team which given their unimaginable but believable plight in a post-apocalyptical world of bleak hopelessness and unremitting funereal landscape, should have been fertile soil for deep pathos, heart wrenching scenes, and copious, uncontrollable tear jerkers. And yet despite the great potential for a bigger-than-life masterpiece in both cinematic and emotional terms, the biggest overriding emotions that the movie could evoke was sheer, unremitting BOREDOM and bone-itching IRRITATION.

In my opinion, the movie was a failure and credit for this is in no small part due to the acting by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Not once is one allowed to be drawn into the scope of the movie and their plight. At no point do you remain unaware that Kodi is acting - and acting very badly. If I had to give him a score between 1 and 10, I would have to say, in fairness and kindness, a negative 5.

As proof of how poorly the movie, and Kodi in particular, managed NOT to connect with the audience - my partner who can tear up over the least emotional tear-jerkers (which he did just watching the trailer of Precious prior to the commencement of this movie), could not even pull out the ghost of tear in the entire movie - not even when the father died.

And despite the good (not great) acting from the other actors, whoever did the casting - especially for Kodi - should be shot. In a world that is more than starving, the kid does not look as if he is particularly hungry. Certainly, definitely not starving. In a scene when he has to take off his shirt (for a bath), at no point do we get a clear shot that shows us that the skinny rib-showing body belongs to the head of Kodi. I think it would be an almost sure bet that the starving body we saw was not his body but that of a (street?) kid who is really starving - or a nameless, non-credited anorexic kid.

Kodi's acting is made much much worse by the fact that, according to the book, his character is supposed to be anywhere between 5-7. On screen, he looks 11 or 12. (In real life, he is 13). But what is grist for additional nausea on top of his overwhelmingly inauthentic performance is that, looking like a 11 or 12 and supposedly a child who has undergone unimaginable horrors and dead bodies and long-term lack of food, he (tried to) act like he is some pampered, girlie, useless, 4-5 year old twat. We ended up rooting for his early and hopefully horrible demise which, having read the book, we knew we would find no such satisfaction.

If you choose to Google some reviews on this movie, you will find a surprisingly number of (overly) good reviews. And I blame the "professional" reviewers (of which my partner is both a fan and part-slave of) that we even went to watch this most disappointing of films. And if not for all the hype around it and the non-secret rumours that this movie is headed for all kinds of nominations and the (surprising) fact that the book on which the movie is based, is a Pulitzer Prize winner - I will have to skeptically say that most people would not bother to waste their time on this movie.

But most people are such suckers for what is supposedly, the learned opinions from people who are "in the know" that at times, I am swear, they abandon their own good sense. If anyone deserves a 10/10 or an Oscar for The Road - it would have to be whoever did the marketing and hype behind this movie.

So if you have a few hours to kill (111 mins) and you don't think life is worthwhile, and you don't mind committing suicide slowly and painfully, then please go and watch the movie. Otherwise if you have a life - even half a life, please don't bother.